Walt Disney's EPCOT: Planning, Control, and a Great Big

Walt Disney’s EPCOT: Planning, Control, and A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow By Joseph M. Neglia

A Dissertation submitted to the

Graduate SchoolNewark

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Master of History

Graduate Program in

written under the direction of

Professor Robert Snyder

and approved by

______

Newark, New Jersey

May 2016

Joseph M. Neglia

Walt Disney’s EPCOT: Planning, Control, and A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow By Joseph M. Neglia Dissertation Director: Prof. Robert Snyder Walt Disney made a career out of revolutionizing animation and filmmaking techniques, continuously pushing the boundaries of the art form while staying true to a vision of a familyfriendly finished product. This visionary zeal seemed to reach its zenith in 1955 with the opening of Disneyland, the world’s first fully themed amusement park that, in many ways, felt like a livable environment. By the 1960s, however, Disney had begun to once again grow restless, and turned his creative attentions to a much larger scale challenge: attempting to fix what was perceived as the “urban crisis” of the era in the United States. Building off the ideas, model concepts, and failures of previous urban planners, Disney sought to create a foolproof concept: design a futuristic city using technology and architectural techniques his team at WED Enterprises at learned at Disneyland, and build it on enough privately owned land that nobody could build an unwanted and unplanned development immediately beyond the city limits. The city was to be known as

EPCOT (“Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow”), and it would be located in Orlando and Kissimmee, Florida. This study seeks to trace the history of

EPCOT’s development and planning, but also to understand why EPCOT never came to be in the form it was originally designed as, arriving at a conclusion that for as foolproof as Disney’s plans seemed, there are some factors that are simply beyond the control of even the biggest dreamers, factors that force compromise and change even in the grandest, boldest ideas.

ii Contents:

Introduction ...... pg. 1 …………………………… ……………………… …………………

One Little Spark: The Inspirations Behind EPCOT ... .pg. 6 ………………………… ……

Shortcomings and Criticisms: Who’s in Charge, Here? ...pg. 15 …………………………

The Happiest Place on Earth .....pg. 20 ……………………………………………………

Meet Me at the Fair! New York, 19641965 .....pg. 28 ……………………………………

Reach for New Horizons: The EPCOT “Sales Pitch” .....pg. 39 ……………………………

And When It Becomes a Reality Walt Disney World, Reedy Creek, EPCOT Center, … and the PostWalt Years .. ..pg. 56 …… ……………………………………………………

Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye The Limits of Control ...... pg. 77 … ………………………

iii Images

A Look at the Progress City Model . .pg. v ……………………………… …………………

Ebenezer Howard’s Vision of Social Cities, 1898...... pg. 9 …………………………… …

Northland Center, Detroit 1954 ...... pg. 17 ………………………… ………………… …

Kew Gardens Interchange, Queens, New York . ....pg. 17 ……………………………… …

Disneyland, Aerial View ...... pg. 24 …… ………………………… ………………………

19641965 New York World’s Fair Grounds .. .pg. 35 ………………………………… …

Carousel of Progress, Opening Scene...... pg. 35 …………………………………………

Walt Disney’s Rough Sketch for EPCOT ..pg. 47 …………………………………………

Disney in Front of Radial Plan Concept Art ...... pg. 47 ……………………………… ……

Remaining Fragment of Original “Progress City” Model ....pg. 57 ………………………

Aerial View of EPCOT Center’s Future World ...... pg. 57 …………………………………

Contemporary Resort, w/Monorail Line and Mary Blair Designed Mural .....pg. 61 ……

Spaceship Earth and EPCOT Center Monorail .. .. pg. 61 …………………………… ……

EPCOT Center Future World Pavilion Signage ...... pg. 67 ………………… ……………

Aerial View of Celebration, Florida ..pg. 76 ………………………………………………

EPCOT Center Dedication Plaque .... .pg. 84 …………………………………………… …

A portion of a much larger model of EPCOT, “Progress City”, demonstrates the level of detail in Disney’s plans for his “city of tomorrow”. “A Look at the Progress City Model”. Digital Image. Imagineering Disney Blog. Accessed March 25, 2014. www.imagineeringdisney.com/blog/2010/7/22/alookattheprogresscitymodelthenandnow.html

Many contemporary American cities find themselves in a peculiar cultural place: experiencing a level of growth unknown since the 1960s, but now having to contend more frequently with challenges such as gentrification, new construction, and increased demand for social services.1 Arguments abound concerning the best ways to handle these matters; some trumpet the benefits of close partnerships between the public and private sectors for urban job creation and largescale development projects, while others counter with the dangers of overreliance on alltootransient private capital, profit motives, and a lack of affordable housing and overuse of eminent domain.2

These are serious challenges surrounded by serious debates, but the fact that

“growth” has returned to the American urban lexicon seems like a welcome reprieve from the era that saw most Americans of means abandon cities: the 1960s are often, and perhaps aptly, described as the most turbulent decade in American history, and the political focal point of many of the struggles and controversies of the era circled around urban centers. Only a few decades earlier the nation’s population had become primarily urban, but increased contact among so many peoples and cultures was creating new conflicts and contentious spaces. Whether it involved economics, racial strife and segregation, aesthetics, or any number of other factors, it became

1 Frizell, Sam. "Here's Why Americans Are Fleeing the Suburbs." Time. April 25, 2014. Accessed April 13, 2016. http://time.com/72281/americanhousing/ 2 Reitmeyer, John. "More Issues." State Lawmakers Tout PublicPrivate Partnerships as Way to Revive Cities. November 20, 2015. Accessed April 13, 2016. http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/15/11/19/statelawmakerstoutpublicprivat epartnershipsaswaytorevivecities/

clear as the 1960s progressed that a large portion of the nation had begun to see

America’s cities minimally as troubled, or in fullon crisis at worst.

This sentiment was clearly put into words in the text of, and discussion

around, the 1966 Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act (also

referred to as the Model Cities Act), where Congress declared the burgeoning urban

crisis to be the greatest domestic policy issue that had to be tackled as part of

3 Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Given that the majority of Americans lived in or

immediately around urban areas in the 1960s, the thinking appeared to be that

tackling issues of poverty, poor education, health care costs, and crime would take

not only treating existing ills in American cities, but actually looking beyond existing

cities, and, in a bold move driven perhaps by Space Age optimism, building entirely

new urban communities based on the latest thinking, planning, and technological

4 innovations. The new visions of the future might be built just outside exis ting cities,

or in some cases even spring up, it might seem, out of nowhere. The concepts often

smacked of “topdown” architectural Modernism: an attempt to create meticulously

planned developments that would optimistically emphasize scientific and economic

efficiency, reassuring and unified aesthetics, and allow for future redevelopment

projects on much larger scales, generated in response to a sense that contemporary

cities had become fractured and chaotic by the mid 1900s.5 Planners, architects,

3 Mannheim, Steve, Walt Disney and the Quest for Community. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2002. pg. xiv 4 Hunt, D. Bradford. “Model Cities”. Encyclopedia of Chicago. Accessed March 13, 2014. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/832.html 5 Guillén, Mauro F. The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical: Scientific Management and the Rise of Modernist Architecture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pages 12. For the purposes of this analysis, Guillén’s definition of “Modernist”

3 politicians, and urbanists the world over would gravitate toward America in this time, pushing forward groundbreaking, often pieinthesky ideas that could potentially not only solve America’s urban ills, but fundamentally transform the entire nature of American urbanism. Yet while some of these ideas found levels of success, the grandest visions seemed to waiver or meet great resistance, never achieve full implementation or, in worse cases such as some high rise housing projects, face abject failure.

Not coincidentally, though, 1966 also marked the year that a presentation about one such new, planned city was filmed for broadcast across America’s television airwaves, only this project was not derived from Model Citiesinspired federal or state government planning, nor directly from academia, but from an animation studio, albeit the most famous one in the world. In what would be his final filmed appearance, legendary animator and studio owner Walt Disney hosted a sales pitch and explanation of a concept he had almost completely devoted the final years of his life to creating, and its sheer scale had the potential to stand out from almost any other major development concept of the time.

Walt Disney had been known for many years as a cartoonist, a director, and a man who was quick to embrace innovation in movie making technology and presentation, from sound in cartoons (Steamboat Willie, 1928), to color animation (Flowers and Trees, 1932), to fulllength animated features (Snow White and the will be used in reference to the optimistic goal of creating unified designs by utilizing advanced technology with the intent of using the efficiency of these techniques and materials to improve society on a largescale level. Many, though not all, of these concepts are the product of a “top down” approach driven by their builder/creator, as will become evident.

Seven Dwarfs, 1937). In 1955 Disney and his company had taken perhaps their boldest step forward with the opening of Disneyland, a new type of theme park attraction, constructed in Anaheim, California. What was immediately clear about

Disneyland was that it was set apart from its surroundings; while the 160acre park was built to be easily accessible by car from southern California’s Santa Ana

Expressway, it was tucked away from plain sight, separated both by a sizeable parking lot as well as a manmade berm that worked like an earthwork barricade, creating for those within the park’s confines an illusion of isolation from the surrounding freeway and motels. Eventually “guests” (the Disney Company’s term for park patrons) could access Disneyland by parking nearby and then riding to the entrance on an elevated monorail train, and then partake in a selfcontained experience within the park.

It wasn’t long before the park had attained major cultural significance, and only slightly longer before Disney began eying the possibility of expansion.

However, Disney knew he’d be limited in expanding Disneyland itself, given its proximity to the freeway. Instead, Disney turned his attention to acquiring a much larger, much more isolated plot of land, eventually settling on an enormous expanse of forest and swamp land in central Florida, near Orlando and Kissimmee and within both Orange and Osceola counties. Immediately the thinking was that a new

Disneyland would be built there; but while Walt did acknowledge that a new park

would be constructed on the land, he was quick to add “there will never be another

6 Disneyland.”

On the one hand, this statement could hardly come as a surprise given

Disney’s long history of pursuing innovations in the filmmaking process as well as

his aversion to sequels in his studio. On the other, Disney’s vision for his new Florida

property was much larger, much grander in scope, and for a time left people unable

to quantify exactly what he wished to accomplish in the murky central Floridian

swamps. Not surprisingly, his vision almost perfectly aligned with much of the

thinking that would come to form the Model Cities Act. The 43 square miles that

eventually evolved into the Walt Disney World Resort would not simply include a

theme park and Mickey Mouse merchandise; in fact at its very heart, its center,

would lay a brand new city, built upon the concept that such a new urban space

combined with vision, government cooperation, and help from American free

enterprise would create a model community that could become a working

laboratory of new technologies and urban planning ideas. This “Experimental

Prototype Community of Tomorrow”, or EPCOT, borrowed numerous ideas from

th mid20 century urban planners, was thought up as a solution to the perceived 1960s urban crisis in America, and would act as such a solution by creating a planned city that would seek a higher quality of life for residents through technological innovation and incredibly detailed, aesthetically consistent planning that could be used in similar developments around the nation.

Unlike what befell many other grand design ideas in this era, the groundwork that Walt Disney laid seemed foolproof: if the cities of the 1960s were fractured and in disrepair, he would bypass them and build a new city on a tabula rasa in Florida; if middle class families had gravitated toward cookie cutter suburbs in the vein of

Levittown, he would lure them back to citycentric life via his unmatched showmanship and access to new technology; if getting federal, state, and local governments to coordinate efforts proved difficult, his bringing development to sleepy central Florida meant he would be granted unmatched influence and oversight over his new property and could efficiently and directly oversee his new city. In the end, though, despite EPCOT’s lofty Modernist inspirations and concepts and despite the undeniably favorable circumstances that seemed to ensure its success, Walt Disney’s Progress City would, just like the ideas of many of his contemporaries, never be completely fulfilled for reasons beyond the one factor necessary to see the vision all the way through: complete and utter control. In a contemporary era that has seen a rebirth in many American cities and has bred new debates about the course of their futures, EPCOT serves to highlight the limits of

“topdown” private sector urban reforms, as corporate shakeups, market forces, and even the simple passage of time can take even the grandest, most ambitious, and seemingly foolproof of projects and halt or alter them before they even begin.

One Little Spark: The Inspirations Behind EPCOT

Tracing the sources of the American urban crisis, both perceived and real, is a daunting task; different American cities operated and evolved under unique

circumstances, with different industries, leaders, and schools of thought dictating

the directions they would take. One may point to the beginning of the decline of

American manufacturing; to the racial reactionaries taking umbrage to the Great

Migration of the 1920s; or to the sheer crowding caused by the mass movement

away from rural America and farming and toward the city, followed relatively

quickly by the postWorld War II white migration toward the suburbs; all were

major factors that led to strife, unrest, economic woes, and at times extreme bursts

of violence in America’s cities.

This is not to say, however, that the very notion of an urban crisis scenario

was entirely unique to the middle of the 20th century. Going back to his days as a

youth, first as a toddler in turnofthetwentiethcentury Chicago and then later on

in teenaged travels to Kansas City, Walt Disney never quite understood the allure of

urban spaces, at least as they existed in those days. The cities of Walt’s childhood

often lacked effective sanitation, with street layouts and housing expansions driven

more by Gilded Age labor practices than by any great vision to improve the living

conditions of its people. Walt’s befuddlement only grew when he relocated to Los

Angeles, today considered the epitome of an American sprawling city, to become a

cartoonist in the 1920s. In 1948 while on a train to the Chicago Railroad Fair, Walt

sounded off to Ward Kimball, one of his top animators and a fellow railfan, stating “I

can’t figure out why in the hell everybody lives in the city where they don’t have any

room and can’t do anything”7 , as Walt, a farm boy in his youth, saw empty spaces as

7 Gennaway, Sam. Walt and the Promise of Progress City. Pike Road, AL: Ayefour Publishing, 2011. Page 224.

8 places for greater opportunity and reflection. Just as Disney could not ever leave well enough alone with regards to innovations in animation, he seemed to feel that if cities were not going to be planned and done correctly, then they should not be done at all.

Even before Disney’s birth, the crisis of the slums of the Industrial Revolution vexed urban planners and academics the world over. One of the grandfathers of the movement to rethink cities was British urban planner Ebenezer Howard, author of the sort of urtome of Modernist urban planning, 1898’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow (originally ToMorrow!: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform).8 While certainly sprung from the utopist thinking of the era, Howard’s plans were steeped in rigorous research. First, Howard sought to pinpoint the cause of the slum crisis: in this case, the forced influx of country residents who could no longer make their livings as farmers, and thus had no choice but to relocate to the city and leave their old lives behind, creating an enormous need for fast, often slapdash urban expansion. Second,

Howard sought to answer what drove people to live in either the country or in cities, analyzing their positive and negative tributes, and concluded that only by combining them in what he referred to as the “TownCountry” could the best of both worlds, so to speak, be achieved.

8 Howard, Ebenezer. Garden Cities of Tomorrow, Illustrated Edition. Gloucester, UK: Dodo Press, 2009. Introduction page iiipage 8.

A depiction of Ebenezer Howard’s concept from his highly influential Garden Cities of Tomorrow illustrates Howard’s vision for a central city surrounded by a green belt and then satellite cities that would spring up around it, all connected via rail. Areas in between would be reserved for vital yet land and resourceconsuming community needs, leaving the residents within the circular nodes in “smokeless cities”. His design inspired the ideas of generations of urban planners, such as Victor Gruen’s cellular urban design and Walt Disney’s Radial Plan. “Ebenezer Howard’s Vision of Social Cities, 1898”. Digital image. CITY. March 30, 2011. Accessed October 1, 2015. http://www.cityanalysis.net/wpcontent/uploads/2011/03/ebenezerhowardsocialcities.jpg

Lastly, Howard outlines his plan for what he calls the “Garden City”, an urban space of 32,000 citizens with all of the magnetic qualities of the countryside worked in: a circular city with a grand, green park in its center, with avenues radiating outward into larger circles first containing shops, then a larger circle with a glasscovered public arcade, and then even larger circles containing houses and gardens. Beyond that would be factories, cemeteries, rock quarries, and necessary areas of resource cultivation (timber, coal, etc.), and even further beyond a wide expanse of natural greenery, until at last one happened upon the next town over, a slightly smaller satellite of the original. Importantly, all of these circles, resource areas, and satellite communities would be connected by rail, so that residents may have their choice of journeying into the city, or taking a day trip out into the countryside. In an era of industrial pollution and overcrowded slums, the Garden

City model no doubt held a great deal of allure. Even if the cause of his era’s cities ills were different, Howard’s influence on midtwentieth century urban thinkers, Disney included, would become highly evident.

Still, the 1960s were an era of unique circumstances, and while pinpointing the exact cause or moment that triggered the apparent 1960s urban crisis proves a formidable challenge, a clearer pattern seems to emerge when one analyzes some of

th the proposed solutions that evolved over the course of the mid20 century. Of all the planners, politicians, architects, and theorists who formulated plans and blueprints to “fix” this crisis, two that stand apart as clear contemporary influences on what Walt Disney would eventually dream up are former New York City Park

Commissioner Robert Moses, head of the Park Commission from 1934 through

1960, and Austrian architect Victor Gruen, considered to be the father of the modern day shopping mall. While ample studies and analyses of the lives, work, and influence of both men abound, for the purposes of this analysis they will be looked at in terms of their direct influence on Disney’s plans for EPCOT.

Robert Moses vision for New York City served as a veritable advertisement for the ideals of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal for America. Upon his appointment to the Parks Commission by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Moses immediately set about making ample use of the federal funding provided to New York for public parks and recreation areas, and seemed to take note of the only project that was

9 granted more federal money than parks: highway construction. Overviews of

Moses’ work indicate a clear focus on not just what he wished to accomplish, but where he wished to do it; Moses clearly saw increased green space, recreational areas, carfriendly infrastructure, and local attractions such as aquariums and renovated beaches as beneficial to the overall image of New York and the wellbeing of its residents, but a quick glance at the location of many of his most famous projects clearly demonstrate that, while he didn’t necessarily ignore Manhattan, his focus was very much on the outer boroughs, especially those located on Long Island.

9 “Robert Moses and the Modern Park System (19291965).” Online Historic Tour: NYC Parks. Accessed April 7, 2014. http://www.nycgovparks.org/about/history/timeline/robertmosesmodernparks This timeline from the New York City Parks website provides some numbers to illustrate the scale of the undertaking; 70,000 Parks Department relief workers in 1934, dozens of recreational buildings and hundreds of new public parks by 1936, and a near tripling of acreage put aside as park land in New York City by the time of Moses’ retirement from the Commission in 1960.

The reasons for Moses’ focusing away from the city center seem to revolve

around his belief that American life was shifting fully toward what he called “a

10 motorized civilization” ; even his New York Times obituary spills a good deal of ink pointing out Moses’ direct hand in the building of many of the highways that now crisscross the island, leading toward and ringing around New York City and

Manhattan, working to create a clear distinction between a residential island, that is

Long Island, to the east and a “destination” and work island to the west, in this case

Manhattan and its immediate surroundings. While this may indicate Moses simply planning along with postwar trends that led many veterans toward suburbs such as

Levittown, his continued building and eventual focus on hitherto undeveloped areas such as Flushing Meadows illustrated a desire to build a new, idealized community away from what may have been viewed as overdeveloped areas in and around

Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn or the Bronx. This issue will be touched upon later.

Similarly, the Austrian architect and Third Reich refugee Victor Gruen held a vision that he hoped would transform the layout, usage, and benefits of urban

th spaces in mid20 century America. Before fleeing his homeland for the United States in 1938, Gruen had grown up with and taken note of the layout of his native

Vienna, which in 1848 had been physically transformed to reflect a rising tide of and desire for democracy within the nation. Government buildings had been altered to face toward public streets, physical walls that had once separated the urban elite from the common throng circling the city were removed, and perhaps most

10 Goldberger, Paul. “Robert Moses, Master Builder, is Dead at 92.” New York Times, July 30, 1981.

13 importantly of all to Gruen’s life’s work, a large, ringed public mall called the

Ringstrasse was built that granted free and open access, wide sidewalks, and

11 sweeping urban views to all Viennese, rich and poor alike.

Within just a few years of his arrival in the United States, Gruen worked his way into a position to bring a bit of Vienna to a space that he felt needed a major overhaul and a taste of urbanization, and by the 1950s he had his own firm and the

12 chance to bring his vision to what he dubbed “the AntiCity”: America’s suburbs.

Gruen saw the suburbs as an unfortunate side effect of the deterioration of

American cities; unplanned areas of sprawl, increasingly swelling up with those who wished to escape declining cities, leading to “unplanned” expansion and chaos as

13 well as the destruction of “natural beauty”.

What Gruen wound up designing in 1954 was an attempt to transform what he saw as the ugliness of suburbia into a planned, orderly, multipurpose and decidedly democratic new urbanist vision: Northland shopping mall, outside

Minneapolis, Minnesota, which was to be a “twomillion square foot center [that] included outdoor space auditoriums, a bank, a post office, local retailers and a … 14 supermarket.” Rather than destroy or ignore downtown Minneapolis, Gruen instead saw a chance to design an alternative that could bring urbanism into the

11 Gladwell, Malcolm. “The Terrazzo Jungle.” The New Yorker, March 15, 2004. 12 Mannheim, Steve, Walt Disney and the Quest for Community, Introduction pg. xiv 13 Fresno: A City Reborn. © Victor Gruen Associates. Los Angeles, 1968. YouTube. Accessed March 30, 2014. 14 Byrnes, Mark. “Victor Gruen Wanted to Make Our Suburbs More Urban. Instead, He Invented the Mall.” The Atlantic Cities, July 18, 2013.

suburbs, as well as create a mold which preexisting cities such as Minneapolis could

follow as a means of rehabilitating their usage and image.

In this vision, customers would get to enter a complex designed with their

comfort and convenience in mind, which Gruen saw as well aligned with the

interests of vendors who would populate the complex. Everything was to be

meticulously planned to optimize the customer’s experience, as well as the earning

potential of the shops, markets, and other places of business that would reside

within. The concept would be further developed and refined with time; in explaining

the merits of the approach, Gruen contemporary and Short Hills Mall (Short Hills,

New Jersey) designer Alfred Taubman provides an example of just how thorough

the planning could be. Concerning building materials used to lay down floors and its

relationship with customer comfort:

People used to use monolithic terrazzo in centers, but it cracked easily and was difficult to repair. Women, especially, tend to have thin soles. We found that they are very sensitive to the surface, and when they get on one of those terrazzo floors it’s like a skating rink. They like to walk on the joints. The only direct contact you have with the building is through the floor. How you feel about it is very important. And even on the topic of using transparent handrails for the sake of vendors:

We didn’t want anything to disrupt the view (what Taubman refers to as “threshold resistance”) You buy something … because it is available and attractive You can’t have any obstacles. 15 … The goods have to be all there.

15 Gladwell. “The Terrazzo Jungle” – Taubman’s quotes and the look back at Gruen’s early malls make plain the emphasis placed on aesthetic beauty, using such design elements as glass atriums, “soft lighting”, even aviaries to create this new environment, as well as an emphasis on the practical, from the use of climate control technology to the sequential placement of particular stores in order to stimulate more purchasing by consumers.

Gruen’s ideas and concepts would continue squaring firmly on what he saw

as a crystal clear vision for convenience in urban life; the article cited previously

from The New Yorker includes quotes from Gruen where he details his dream for Manhattan, a highly Modernist vision that included 150story high residential towers, with surrounding saved areas converted into gardens, parks, and cultural spaces, and a clear emphasis on walking as the chief means of transportation, with cars and other vehicles left to drive in underground tunnels while in the city and on highways when immediately outside of it.

Those ideas, particularly the last one concerning a deemphasis on the automobile and active catering to the pedestrian in the urban setting, truly reached out and grabbed the imagination of Walt Disney. In fact, Walt was so taken with

Gruen’s work that, according to long time Disney Chief Archivist Dave Smith, in the mid 1960s while in the middle of planning his experimental city the only book he had in his immediate office inventory on the topic of urban planning was a copy of

Gruen’s famed 1964 work The Heart of Our Cities.16

Shortcomings and Criticisms: Who’s in Charge, Here?

Unfortunately for him, Gruen’s glorious vision of a “one stop shop” for all a customer’s urban center needs would not come to full fruition for a number of reasons; economic realities, tax code laws, and available local government funds

16 Gennaway, Sam. “Walt Disney’s E.P.C.O.T. and the Heart of Our Cities.” 2014. The Original E.P.C.O.T. Project. Accessed September 10, 2015. https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/epcotandtheheartofourcities.

16 meant piecemeal construction and an unforeseen consequence of the “AntiCity” spreading even further, this time in and around his shopping malls. Indeed, so jaded was Gruen by this turn of events that by 1978 he would disown his creation, stating

17 flatly “I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments.”

In fact, despite the seeming public hunger for new developments in American cities, it became clear quite quickly that utopian visions and largescale projects would not often prove realistic, nor satisfy the very people they were often designed, at least nominally, to help. While Gruen ran into economic and local political situations that limited what he could do, Robert Moses often faced resistance from local communities within New York City. The now late, great urbanist Marshall Berman speaks critically of Moses’ outlook in his lecture

“Emerging From the Ruins”, pointing out Moses’ lack of consideration for people he considered to be “small” or parochial in their thinking, standing athwart of social progress as Moses’ highways and redevelopment projects cut through their

17 Byrnes. “Victor Gruen Wanted to Make Our Suburbs More Urban ” – Between … this and the Gladwell piece is an overview of legal taxation policies that made investment in shopping centers more lucrative, but harmed investment in noncommercial aspects of Gruen’s planned communities. Federal tax law granted tax breaks to compensate for depreciation in capital investments; meant to spurn on manufacturing, it wound up inadvertently granting the most lucrative deals to shopping centers. This triggered a mallconstruction craze that led to multiple shopping centers springing up in towns regardless of their population growth/decline trends, which deincentivized the construction of those other aspects of Gruen’s vision, such as apartments, schools, banks, etc. being included.

Federal tax laws would inadvertently reduce Victor Gruen’s vision for a grand, “onestopshop” new downtown core into the modern shopping mall. Though surrounded by fields, Gruen’s dreaded “AntiCity” would soon encroach on its borders. “Northland Center, Detroit (1954)”. Digital image. Reurbanist. May 13, 2013. Accessed April 20, 2014. http://reurbanist.com/2013/05/thegrueneffectvictorgruenandtheshoppingmall/

Interchanges such as the Van Wyck were brought into being in and around New York City under the direction of Robert Moses, often cutting through older, established neighborhoods, which stirred resentment among residents. Such projects highlighted the inherent tension in placing large, Modernist projects in preexisting communities. “Kew Gardens Interchange, Queens, NY, I678, Grand Central & Jackie Robinson Parkway”. Digital Image. Empire State Roads. May 7, 2001. Accessed April 20, 2014. http://www.empirestateroads.com/week/week32.html

18 neighborhoods and altered the economics of their homes seemingly overnight.

Elsewhere, he notes not only his personal sense of loss when the CrossBronx

Expressway cut through his childhood neighborhood, but also how Moses had “his

ability to convince a mass public that he was the vehicle of impersonal

worldhistorical forces, the moving spirit of modernity”, a oneman source of power

who could undo and rebuild anything in the blink of an eye, while most people were

stuck working for years just to barely slow him down if his visions cut through their

19 homes.

The problem, it seemed, was that men like Moses and Gruen, for all of their

bombast and vision, could not hope to implement such farreaching concepts in

spaces already densely populated, established and lived in for centuries, areas that

at any given time could be reshaped not by singular visionaries and planners, but by

the very people living in it, or economic and political forces altering the citizenry’s

relationship with the city. Thomas Dolan presents an excellent case study of such a

project by analyzing the Gateway Complex in Newark, NJ. Billed for years as a key

feature of the “New Newark” meant to rise up out of the ashes of the 1968 riots,

Gateway was designed to clear an enormous number of federal hurdles that would

allow it to be funded, and was at heart a response to federal programs that had

20 encouraged postwar white flight from cities such as Newark. It would create a very

th 18 Berman, Marshall. Emerging From the Ruins. 9 Annual Lewis Mumford Lecture nd on Urbanism. City College of New York. May 2 2013. YouTube. Accessed April 2, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPiiJJdrHc 19 Berman, Marshall, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin Books Ltd., 1988. Page 294. 20 Dolan, Thomas. “Newark and Its Gateway Complex”. The Newark Metro. Accessed March 15, 2014. http://www.newarkmetro.rutgers.edu/reports/display.php?id=17

19 new, modern, and seemingly welcoming complex for mostly white commuters who would not even have to set foot on a Newark sidewalk after arriving by train; would house vendors, shops, and restaurants; and would be situated near McCarter

Highway and just off of newly constructed Route 78. Both the Complex and the highway offered Newark a chance to collect tax revenue lost thanks to postwar white flight, yet in the process enormous tracts of housing would be demolished; housing that, postwar, would largely have gone to AfricanAmerican families, ineligible to receive loans for suburban purchases thanks to federal policy influenced by Congressmen representing the Jim Crow South. In effect, Gateway would soon prove itself to be the proverbial square peg in the round hole; a new,

Modernist attempt at recasting the image of a centuries old city that, for its part, did not have the means nor necessarily the desire to adapt to that vision.

Thus, while someone like Gruen might visualize a new, modern urban space that could replace the preexisting and chaotic suburban sprawl of postwar America, and while leaders like Moses might have authority to tear down and rebuild acreage stretching to all corners of one of the richest states in the nation, their visions faced a stark, halting reality. The facts prove inescapable: in a representative democracy, and in communities established long before the visionary’s arrival, there will be resistance to change, varied economic considerations, racial or ethnic tensions, and willful choices by people and politicians that will not allow for one singular vision to

Dolan’s account thoroughly details how human agency and political choices shaped the shifting demographics of older cities like Newark from the 1940s through the 1960s and beyond, and how project such as Gateway never seemed to be able to balance appealing for federal loans with protecting the interests of current residents, now largely minority.

20 dominate an entire metropolitan area, because no one plan can account for such variance, disruption, and human agency creating an unstable landscape on which to build such largescale and transformative projects.

Yet all of these factors, from the ideas to the attempted execution to the conflicts that either prevented or limited them from reaching their full potential, bring the topic back to one Walter Elias Disney. Taking inspiration from figures like

Gruen and Moses, but also taking note of the factors that would limit them, Disney sought to put to use resources that would grant him the freedom to act however he saw fit in order to create what he saw as the ideal, modern city. Fortunately, he already had a very useful template to build off of.

The Happiest Place on Earth

As stated previously, Walt Disney and the Disney Company had built what would become a cultural touchstone in 1955 when they opened Disneyland in

Anaheim, California. Disneyland was unique; rather than a midway filled with basic, unrelated rides, games, and attractions, Disney instead created a park filled with themed attractions and areas, with selfexplanatory descriptors for the areas such as Frontierland, Main Street USA, Adventureland, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland.

The basic idea for the park had been born from Disney’s experiences taking his young daughters out on weekends, where the children would ride a carousel or

Ferris wheel while Disney, in his words, “[would] sit on the bench eating peanuts

21 while they rode. And sitting there, alone, I felt that there should be something built,

21 some kind of family park where parents and children could have fun together.”

From a financial standpoint, despite a fairly bumpy opening Disneyland became a success very quickly, surpassing the ten million visitor mark by 1957 and drawing over forty percent of its “guests” from outside of California, families driving

22 in on the new federally funded highway systems to reach Anaheim. However, a small scratch beneath the surface revealed that Disneyland was meant as much more than just a family park and marketing mechanism for Disney’s movie studio.

Books, blogs, and magazines have been written about what originally set

Disneyland apart from almost every other amusement park that existed before it, but every feature that set it apart revolved around one key concept: the ability to control the sensory and ambulatory experiences of park guests once they passed through the turnstiles. Disneyland was meant to serve primarily as a “show”23 ; given the moviemaking talents behind its creation, it stood to reason that the guest experience would almost seem guided by a director’s will. This design was immediately reflected in Disneyland’s single gate entrance that funneled all guests into Main Street USA, a feature that immediately set it apart from multientranced and gridlike patterned carnival midways.

While this crowd feeding system might create congestion on busy days, a walk down Main Street USA served as a kind of thesis statement for the larger

21 Marling, Karal Ann. “Disneyland 1955: Just Take the Santa Ana Freeway to the American Dream.” American Art, Vol. 5, No. ½, WinterSpring 1991. Page 175. 22 Marling. “Disneyland 1955 ” page 174 … 23 Mannheim, Steve. Walt Disney and the Quest for Community. Pages 1620

Disneyland experience, which could be summarized with the phrase “the architecture of reassurance”.24 By all accounts Walt was always fascinated with the science and art of how and why people moved within a planned space, and his park’s walkable layout, and not just its rides, allowed him to observe and control a lot of that process.

The layout of Main Street worked like an idealized version of an early 20th century small town, perhaps like Walt’s own childhood home of Marceline, Missouri, except here asphalt replaced dirt roads and horse waste was never a concern. The buildings, designed to appear like a general store, a firehouse, a town hall, and other small town standards, were built to 5/8th scale, with larger first floors leading to smaller second stories, a sort of three dimensional form of the filmmaking effect known as forced perspective, making them seem impressive yet accessible. Signage, graphics, and colors all worked off a common template, creating unity of appearance and eliminating visual contradictions, while period appropriate bandstandstyle music filled the air, and even artificial aromas like that of baking cookies might waft from the Main Street bakery, released from a Disney creation known as a smellitzer.

At the end of Main Street was a circular plaza lined with trees and park benches, a sort of wheel that included numerous spokes leading off into the various themed lands beyond, and all culminating with a view of Sleeping Beauty Castle, a prefabricated structure that served as what Walt called a “wienie”, an

24 Mannheim, Steve. Walt Disney and the Quest for Community. Pages 5458. These pages help paint a picture of Main Street USA. Disney’s take on small town America proved so popular that the company sometimes received requests from towns looking to rehabilitate their downtown shopping districts. What this said about the loss of “authenticity” in American towns is a matter of debate.

attentiongrabbing structure meant to allow guests to orient themselves regardless

of where they stood in the park. Despite how structured this whole experience was,

Walt insisted on leaving enough space and room for development so that new

walkways and paths could be built based on how guests decided to navigate areas of

the park. John Hench, who helped design Disneyland and other Disney theme parks,

made it clear that reassurance was always the key, as “the active clutter that you see

in the real world, which creates mixed messages, sets up conflicts, creates tension,

and may even feel threatening.”25 By ensuring that theming remained consistent,

that spacemen from Tomorrowland were not walking around the same area as the

cowboys in Frontierland, contradictions could be smoothed out, and reassurance

achieved.

One of the most noticeable, and without a doubt one of the most heavily

26 advertised features of Disneyland was its emphasis on transportation. Whi le

numerous attractions utilized vehicles ranging from merrygoround horses to

fantastical submarines or space agestyled rockets, many Disney promotional films

at the time chose to emphasize the park’s utilization of a steam locomotive that

surrounded the park, eraappropriate horse drawn carriages in the idealized turn of

25 Gennaway, Sam. Walt and the Promise of Progress City. Page 126 26 Disneyland USA © Walt Disney Productions. October 27, 1966 episode. YouTube. Accessed March 2, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLCHg9mUBag

Disneyland from the sky. Visible are the “hub” area at the center of the park, the “spoke and wheel” model that guests would follow to enter the different themed areas of the park, and later part of the inspiration for the “Radial Plan” of EPCOT; and the immediate surroundings of the park, which include not just the parking lot, but encroaching businesses that sprung up around it. Disney made it a high priority to buy enough land in Florida to ensure these surroundings wouldn’t follow him east. Boser, Robert J. “Disneyland, Aerial View”. Digital image. Word Press. August, 1963. Accessed April 25, 2014. https://fatherlyadviceandrants.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/1963disneylandnw_to_se_view.jpg?w= 869

25 the century small town Main Street USA, and doubledecker buses that would take guests from one side of the park to another.

However, three years into Disneyland’s life, Walt and his wife Lillian Disney returned from a vacation that had opened Walt’s eyes to an exciting new concept.

Disney’s “Imagineers”, the creative engineers, artists, and designers who sketch out, plan, and build creations and attractions at Disney theme parks and who then comprised the arm of the Walt Disney Productions known as WED Enterprises27 , were charged with a new project: a ride not built around high speed thrills, nor recreations of classic Disney films, nor of adventures in steamy jungles or the wild western frontier; rather, the Imagineers were charged with designing a modern mode of mass public transportation.

The year was 1957, and Walt Disney had just learned what a monorail was.

Or rather, Walt had known about monorails before his trip, but only one kind of monorail: train cars that hung down freely from a track built upon pylons. Indeed,

Walt was so aware of this type of monorail that early sketches of Disneyland’s

Tomorrowland section had included them near its entrance. During their trip to

Germany, Walt and Lilly had visited the small mountain town of Wuppertal, where one such monorail had been in operation for over fifty years. Walt, an avid railfan, wanted to ride, but the swaying of the freehanging cars made Lilly ill. Just days later, however, while driving near Cologne, Walt watched in awe as a new type of

27 WED Enterprises was technically a separate entity from Walt Disney Productions, albeit one that reported directly to Walt, not stockholders. “WED”, after all, stood for “Walter Elias Disney”. WED has since been rechristened “Walt Disney Imagineering”.

monorail, one that rested on top of a track, quietly glided by.28 The concept was simple, yet novel: thin concrete rails would rise into the sky, bearing a single

steelreinforced concrete beam track that would support sleek, relatively

lightweight, nearly silent, electrically powered trains that would glide along

smoothly. Hearing about the prototype developed by the German company ALWEG,

Disney made contact with the company and quickly struck a deal: if ALWEG would

provide Disney with the basic design for the monorail, then Disney’s Imagineers

29 would construct a ride to showcase the technology to Disneyland’s large crowds.

The results were a near instantsuccess; originally a track 8/10ths of a mile long

was strategically placed in the Tomorrowland section of the park, but within three

years the track was extended to 2 ½ miles, capable of actually leaving the Disneyland park proper and taking guests to and from the Disneyland Hotel across

West Street in Anaheim. The track and monorail were the first of their kinds in

30 North America, and millions flocked to take a spin on this vision of the future.

While the monorail no doubt provided Disney with an economic advantage by

keeping guests on a Disney attraction and on Disney property, it was also a clear

indication that Walt’s interests and energies were shifting toward a new fascination.

Still, despite the park’s remarkable successes, just like Gruen’s and Moses’s

projects that had come before it Disneyland also faced a key problem when it came

to completely fulfilling its intended purpose as an escape from the surrounding

28 Gennaway, Sam. Walt and the Promise of Progress City. Page 200. 29 Weiss, Werner. “ALWEG Monorail, Presented by Santa Fe Railroad.” Yesterland.com. Accessed April 2, 2014. http://www.yesterland.com/monorail.html 30 Disneyland USA episode, approximately 4 minutes in

world. No matter how much control Walt could exercise over the experiences inside

the berm of Disneyland, he had no control whatsoever over anything that might

develop around his magic kingdom. Given how much economic activity Disneyland had brought to Anaheim, it was only a matter of time before gaudy motels and cheap souvenir trinket shops began springing up around its parking lot perimeter. Walt often voiced his frustrations over this incursion on his controlled, meticulously planned space, even once stating a bit exasperatedly, though still sporting a wry smile, at the eventual 1965 Florida press conference that “we didn’t create it, but we get blamed for it”.31 Even Victor Gruen singled it out in The Heart of Our Cities as an example of what happened when urban planning was not done thoroughly. He

noted that despite Disneyland’s meticulous planning within its berm, its satellite

developments “proceeded without benefit of any planning...dozens of hotels, stores,

office buildings, restaurants, bars, banks, night clubs, gas stations, lunch counters,

hotdog stands and billboards clutter it up, creating...disorder and blight.”32 One

could imagine Walt Disney reading these words for himself from his own copy of the

book and raising an eyebrow, at the very least.33

31 Fogelsong, Richard E. Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Page 59. 32 Gruen, Victor. The Heart of Our Cities The Urban Crisis: Diagnosis and Cure. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964. Page 295.

33 There are multiple accounts of Walt that say the only way he’d visibly display anger or frustration would be to raise a single eyebrow. Fogelson cites an anecdotal example of this in Married to the Mouse: while at a meeting between Disney executives and St. Louis dignitaries to discuss a possible Disney designed project for the city, Gussie Busch, heir to the Busch beer fortune, drunkenly declared that a theme park could never work if it did not sell alcohol. At that time, Disneyland did not permit alcohol sales. One raised eyebrow and a few hours later, the Disney executives were back in California.

This incursion by the AntiCity did not prevent Disneyland from achieving

enormous success, though, and for a time the park began to fully occupy Walt’s

attention. According to accounts at the time, Disney had begun to tire of the movie

industry. While the 1950s and 1960s brought on successes for the studio such as

Mary Poppins, Disney could not get over the reality that film was finite, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. His interests began to drift toward the types of projects his Imagineers could concoct: threedimensional, fully realized environments that would continue to exist after a ride ended, always capable of being tinkered with,

34 improved, even reinvented. Attractions such as Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion took shape during this time, existing seamlessly within the themed areas of Adventureland and New Orleans Square, respectively, thus creating fully

immersive experiences not to be seen, heard, or even smelled anywhere else.

Disneyland was Disney’s first largescale opportunity to indulge in this interest, but

he would soon gravitate toward a second avenue to continue to get his fix.

Meet Me at the Fair! New York, 19641965

Coincidentally, back east in New York both Victor Gruen and Robert Moses

were heavily involved in attempts to bring another World’s Fair to the United States.

Gruen and his associates were hired to concoct a layout for a model town that would

serve as the staging ground for a Fair in Washington, DC, while Moses attempted to

stage a second World’s Fair for New York City in the span of 25 years.

34 Marling, Karal Ann. “Disneyland 1955 ” Page 173. …

Gruen’s team developed a design that the chief architect hoped could reshape expectations of what a modern city could be: a meticulously planned new development crafted to accommodate pedestrians, to separate living and community centers from various utilitarian functions like electric grids and telephone wires, and built so that after the Fair’s conclusion it could easily be converted into a living, working city of 100,000 residents with minimal expense and effort, using the facilities already constructed for the Fair. Gruen referred to his design, no doubt inspired at least partly be Howard’s Garden Cities model, as

“cellular urban organization”35 , wherein a central, raised pedestrianonly core would contain the Fair grounds and pavilions, which in the years after the Fair would be converted into offices, apartments, and and other urban necessities; the ground beneath the raised center would contain utilities such as storage facilities, truck loading platforms, and air conditioning plants, hidden from view; a surrounding circle of space would be set aside for transportation facilities and parking lots; and surrounding “nuclei” would spring up as satellite communities, all connected via mass transit. The expanding cells or nodes of activity bore a striking resemblance to Disneyland’s radial plan; given Disney’s admiration for Gruen’s work, this is hardly a coincidence.

Despite this intricate planning, Gruen and the Washington Fair team faced stiff competition from an urban planning titan perched upon his throne just a bit over two hundred miles north of their proposed model community. Robert Moses had previously managed to bring the World’s Fair to New York in 1939 while head

35Gruen, Victor. The Heart of Our Cities... pages 292295.

of the Parks Commission, filling in an old swamp and ash dump in Queens to create a

more pristine setting outside the city’s center, but the Fair had failed to turn a profit;

1964 was his opportunity to rectify that. The Fair had become ubiquitous in the

modern Westernized (and, over time, decidedly nonSoviet) world, with expositions

th ranging from 19 century New York City, to Chicago’s famed “White City” Columbian Exposition, to Seattle’s Space Needle and monoraildominated Century 21

Exposition in 1962. Unfortunately for Moses, he could not avoid the rules of the

Parisianbased Bureau of International Expositions (BIE), which stipulated that a

single member nation could not host more than one World’s Fair in the span of a

decade, and Fairs could last no longer than six months in total; Seattle’s fair had only

occurred two years earlier, and Moses had every intention of running his Fair for

36 two separate six month stretches between 1964 and 1965.

Undeterred, and working around the BIE, Moses went forward with the plans

for another Fair at the site of the old one, now known as Flushing Meadows, placing

an emphasis on American industry, entertainment, and culture and turning to

37 smaller, lesser known nations to fill the gap left by member nations of the BIE, who

were prohibited from participating by the organizing body. A billion dollar capital

investment, additional surrounding infrastructure such as the new Van Wyck

36 Byrnes, Mark. “New York’s 1964 World’s Fair Was Actually Something of a Failure.” The Atlantic Cities, October 17, 2013. Accessed April 3, 2014. http://www.theatlanticcities.com/artsandlifestyle/2013/10/newyorks1964wo rldsfairwasactuallysomethingfailure/7273/ 37 World’s Fair Report, with Lowell Thomas. ©1963 New York World’s Fair 19641965 Corporation. YouTube. Accessed April 3, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V41NW5m7Scg Approximately 7 ½ minutes into the video, Thomas details pavilions at the Fair provided by such “nontraditional” nations as Indonesia, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, etc.

Expressway, the construction of municipallyowned Shea Stadium, and finishing

38 touches to Flushing MeadowsCorona Park set the stage for what Moses

undoubtedly hoped could be a staging ground for his own take on the idealized

future of American cities and communities.

Moses, having retired from the Parks Commission and taken on the position

of president of the corporation bringing the Fair to New York, was fond of

describing his Fair as a venue that would offer something for everybody, with

39 cultural offerings ranging from “Michelangelo to Walt Disney”. Cliché as that might

have sounded to the average American in the 1960’s, Moses was not exaggerating;

he not only managed an agreement with Pope John XXIII and the Vatican to loan and

provide the Fair with the world famous Pieta sculpture by Michelangelo, but he had a willing partner in Walt Disney, who would once more charge his Imagineers with using a hefty amount of corporate sponsorship dollars to research, develop, and create cutting edge technology to craft attractions that would wow the enormous crowds that were expected to descend on Queens.

In large part, Disney was deeply curious to learn if the “sophisticated” New

York and East Coast crowds at the Fair would gravitate toward his

Midwestinfluenced Tinsel Town creations. Moses had personally contacted Disney to request that WED Enterprises design a “children’s village” attraction intended to remain permanently after the Fair ended; in effect, Moses was attempting to bring an East Coast Disneyland, or at least a slice of it, to Queens. Although Disney warned

38 “Robert Moses and the Modern Park System” site 39 Tirella, Joseph. “Tomorrow’s America, In Queens.” New York Times, April 21, 2014.

32 that such a permanent project was not tenable without funding from New York

State, and although the softspoken Missourian may have presented a potential personality clash with the brash TriStater, the pairing of Moses and Disney still seemed a match made in heaven: two workaholics known for their grand visions, as well as “outsize imaginations and egos.”40 The two men agreed, and each got something he wanted: Disney would get his corporate sponsorship dollars to research and develop exciting new technology, and while Moses would not get his

“children’s village”, no doubt a potentially very deft political move, he would still get

Walt Disney, both the man and the highly trusted brand name, for his Fair.

When the 1964 New York World’s Fair opened on April 22 of that year, the public was greeted by corporatesponsored demonstrations of new products and

41 technologies, ranging from Sinclair’s “Gas Station of the Future” to Space Agestyle videophones. Some of the most popular and enduring attractions, however, were the ones developed specifically by Disney’s WED Enterprise staff. Disney, both the man and the company, already had ample contacts within the corporate world stemming from sponsorship deals for attractions at Disneyland. American corporations would burst with pride and anticipation at having Walt Disney, America’s favorite

40 Tirella, Joseph. TomorrowLand: The 196465 World’s Fair and the Transformation of America. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2014. Pages 5051. 41 Gas Station of the Future. Sinclair Oil, 1964. YouTube. Accessed April 4, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XG8kplc6A Perhaps it was a sign of the times, a signal of Disneyland’s “forward lookingyetnostalgic” touch, and indicative of the 60s World’s Fair style that Sinclair not only wanted to trumpet a sleek, forward looking, more automated gas station experience, but also an exhibit that idealized the past. In Sinclair’s case, that meant going back to the source of many fossil fuels, demonstrated in the company’s familyfriendly “Dinoland”, which housed many large Fiberglass dinosaurs.

storyteller, step through their doors for a meeting, and loved the positive

associations people developed for them due to their partnership with a company

that many considered to be as wholesome and patriotic as baseball and apple pie.

Disney, in this case the man, appreciated the meetings because it often meant an

opportunity to personally visit and observe the research and development

departments of some of the nation’s biggest companies, and to relish the chance to

observe new technology that was still in its testing phase, a veritable garden of new

ideas to bring back to WED. Imagineer Randy Bright saw the corporate relationships

that developed as “a kind of symbiotic relationship” between Disney and theme park

sponsors like Kodak, Monsanto, TWA, AT&T, and eventually even General Electric,

then one of the top five industrial powers on Earth.42

Partnering up with a few of these corporate backers, Disney and his staff not

only developed rides and shows that made extensive use of Disney’s revolutionary

AudioAnimatronic technology, mechanical “actors” that could be designed and

programmed to move and even emote in an incredibly lifelike manner, they also put

their sponsorship money to good use to produce innovative technologies that might

serve a purpose beyond the Fair. The attractions produced by the Imagineers

included the Magic Skyway, an automobile and highwaypromoting ride sponsored by Ford that featured new, fresh off the assembly line Ford cars as ride vehicles on an electric ride track developed by WED called a “PeopleMover”, which when combined with the constantly moving, and thus constantly loading ride vehicles

42 Mannheim, Steve. Walt Disney and the Quest Pages 9294. …

constituted a system WED dubbed the “Omnimover”43 ; Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, a patriotic demonstration of AudioAnimatronic technology for the State of Illinois pavilion that reenacted many of the sixteenth president’s greatest speeches; it’s a small world, a PepsiCola sponsored tribute to UNICEF that used childlike figures to emphasize world peace and featured a boat rideloading system and

queue specifically researched and made to handle enormous crowds (not to

mention a true earworm of a theme song); and, perhaps most significant to this

analysis, the Progressland pavilion, featuring Carousel of Progress, another AudioAnimatronic based show, this time sponsored by General Electric, that took

44 place in a rotating theater. Of note, each of these attractions would later be transplanted in full or in part to Disney theme parks, where they are still in operation today.

Carousel of Progress, which follows a supposedly typical American family over the course of multiple decades and traces how modern electrical technology has improved their lives, takes on special significance when considering

Walt Disney’s urbanist ambitions. The 360degree venue sat its audience around

43 While we will see the important role the PeopleMover was intended to play in EPCOT, the Omnimover deserves some notice for how it revolutionized people’s expectations at a theme park. Ride vehicles on an Omnimover track are always moving, and thus constantly loading riders, and thus reducing ride waiting times and moving along the track more smoothly and seamlessly. While it would not be able to serve the same urban transit function the PeopleMover was intended to fulfill, it was still driven by the same principle of improving the act of crowd movement. Omnimover attractions such as The Haunted Mansion or Spaceship Earth are still among the most popular at Disney theme parks. 44 FickleyBaker, Jennifer. “Today in Disney History: 1964 World’s Fair Opened 50 Years Ago Today.” Disney Parks Blog, April 22, 2014. Accessed April 25, 2014.

19641965 New York World’s Fair Grounds. Digital Image. Perpetual Geek Machine. September 12, 2011. Accessed April 23, 2014. http://www.perpetualgeekmachine.net/2011/09/disney1964worldsfair/ Of note in this image is the view of Flushing MeadowsCorona Park, with newly built Shea Stadium in the background, but no view of the iconic Manhattan skyline. This was Robert Moses’ attempt to create a new city in the outer borough of Queens and on Long Island.

Moses’ 196465 World’s Fair provided Walt Disney Productions an opportunity to get corporate sponsorship and a venue to demonstrate new technologies, including the PeopleMover transit system used for the Magic Skyway attraction, and AudioAnimatronic “actors” for shows like Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln and Carousel of Progress, which used to end with a viewing of the Progress City model pictured earlier. Carousel of Progress, Opening Scene. Digital Image. Orlando Theme Park News. April 18, 2011. Accessed April 23, 2014. http://www.orlandoparksnews.com/2011/04/disneylooktopastapril1622.html

a theaterintheround style stage, then actually rotated the audience around the

stage between five different show scenes, with scenes two, three, and four set in

past decades to highlight how far laborsaving technology had come since the early

1900s, while scene five depicted what was meant to be a very realistic projection of

family and technological life in the near future. This meant that the Carousel theater was built to accommodate five audiences at once, allowing for greater capacity while showing off yet another innovative entertainment concept to an eager crowd.

Between the animatronic actors and rotating seats, the theater itself was to mirror the efficiency of the PeopleMover and Omnimover systems.

While the rotating theater and lifelike Animatronic family were advanced enough for their time, the show’s keynote musical number, “There’s A Great Big

Beautiful Tomorrow”, not only encouraged showgoers to continue looking to the future and trusting in technological innovation, but also served as, arguably, a thesis statement for Walt Disney’s worldview and ideas. Said longtime and nowvenerable

Disney Imagineer Marty Sklar in a 2003 interview, “Walt Disney was the eternal optimist, and he really believed that things could be better. And Bob and Dick

Sherman [the song’s composers] wrote that song as a personal ode to Walt. They

45 really meant it That was Walt’s anthem, and they recognized that.” The song’s … lyrics drive that message home:

There’s a great, big, beautiful tomorrow, Shining at the end of every day. There’s a great big, beautiful tomorrow, And tomorrow is just a dream away. Man has a dream, and that’s the start,

45 “Tomorrowland.” Walt Disney Treasures DVD Collection. Martin Sklar Interview. Released December 2, 2003

He follows his dream with mind and heart, And when it becomes a reality, 46 It’s a dream come true for you and me.

Optimism for the future certainly stood out as a key theme and driving force

for the Fair; said one original attendee on the occasion of the Fair’s fiftieth

anniversary, “the fair [represented] this last moment of true optimism. We were

looking into the future, and the future looked bright. That really struck a chord with

47 a lot of people.” Such a rosecolored remembrance glosses over a plethora of

cultural and economic problems that already existed among the more vulnerable

and less fortunate in postWorld War II America, but with this spirit in the Queens

air, Carousel of Progress was one of the big hits of the Fair, popular enough that plans were quickly put in place to bring it to the Tomorrowland section of

Disneyland. The show would come complete with two features that truly set it apart and left the greatest imprint on Fairgoers: first, the ending scene set in the nearfuture, where the family now resides in a technological wonderland called

“Progress City” and extols its laborsaving conveniences and supreme liveability, and second, a postshow area on the theater’s second floor, accessible at the end of the show when the curtains would pull back on scene one, revealing a then crowd wowing moving sidewalk that ascended and carried crowds to Progressland’s second floor. Housed on that floor and waiting for the audiences was a working,

moving, scale model of Progress City itself, complete with narration from the father

46 Sherman, Robert B., and Sherman, Richard M. “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.” Carousel of Progress. ©1964 Walt Disney Company. 47 Harpaz, Beth J., “Queens Marks 50 Years Since Iconic 1964 World’s Fair”, Associated Press, April 22, 2014.

and mother from Carousel of Progress, with lights shining on whichever area they 48 described to the crowds.

Walt had long held a fascination with miniatures and scale models, dating back to the 1930s when his doctor had recommended he find a hobby to take his mind off the stress of running his animation studio. Disney, of course, managed to turn his hobby into a passion, devoting boundless energy to it, and combined it with his love of trains and railroads to build the Carolwood Pacific Railroad, a scale model working rail line that he and guests could actually ride around Disney’s own

Burbank backyard. Indeed, some of Walt’s earliest ideas for potential Disney theme parks involved building miniature recreations of moments in American history for a traveling show, before realizing he could build much larger than that in Anaheim.49

Now, for New York, Walt could really embrace his passion for scale models, as he and the Imagineers brought to life a model of a cityscape with working street lights, moving vehicles, furnished living rooms, and even a working, dynamic amusement park.

As Fair crowds packed Progressland and millions had a glimpse at Progress City, the seeds of an idea were being planted. While it may have been a prototype,

one very much still open to tinkering and reimagining, hindsight makes it clear what

was taking shape: it was a scale model of EPCOT.

48 Fritz (author’s internet handle). “A Look at the Progress City Model – Then and Now.” Imagineering Disney, July 22, 2010. Accessed April 25, 2014. http://www.imagineeringdisney.com/blog/2010/7/22/alookattheprogresscity modelthenandnow.html 49 Gennaway, Sam. Walt and the Promise Pages 99102 …

Reach for New Horizons – The EPCOT “Sales Pitch”

Walt Disney always had a knack for big ideas, but by the mid1960’s he may

well have outdone himself. Tired of the encroaching motels, souvenir shops, and

liquor stores popping up around Disneyland in Anaheim, wary of getting too

complacent just building theme park attractions, and having his imagination

sparked and business sense put at ease by his East Coast success at the New York

World’s Fair, Disney decided to settle on a location across the country where WED

50 could design a “Disneyland East”. As successful as the original park was, there was no getting around how inaccessible California was for much of the nation’s population, the majority of which resided east of the Mississippi. This time around, however, Disney’s ambitions were far greater than they had been in Anaheim.

Dating back to 1959, a highly secretive project had begun within the upper echelons of Walt Disney Productions to seek out an eastern location where a new park could be built; locations considered over the years ranged from the

US/Canadian border at Niagara Falls and Flushing Meadows in New York, both considered too cold for yearround operations, plus New York City land prices were a turnoff; to St. Louis and Kansas City, considered for a New Orleansinspired waterfront project; even to Walt’s own childhood home of Marceline, Missouri.

While all of these locations were turned down for their own reasons, from

19591960 Walt did take a keen interest in Florida, having been asked by NBC

50 Koenig, David. Realityland: TrueLife Adventures at Walt Disney World. Irvine, CA: Bonaventure Press, 2007. Pages 2021.

Network to join them in a possible project in Palm Beach.51 Although the project, meant to combine residential and amusement spaces on land owned by eccentric billionaire John D. MacArthur, never panned out, the germ of an idea made its way into Walt’s mind: the eastern park would happen, but it would happen on one of the large tracts of sparsely inhabited land in Florida. Once an idea like that germinated in Walt’s mind, deterring him from pursuing it to the end typically proved impossible.

Fortunately for the Disney Company, progrowth businessmen and politicians in central Florida were about to make their search for a perfect location much simpler. Through the middle of the twentieth century, the city of Orlando stood as the most populated city in inland Florida, the benefactor of occasional land booms and the arrival of both World War II era US Army bases and eventually a plant established by defense company Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin).

Nevertheless, Orlando remained a largely sleepy metropolitan area, its population hovering below 55,000, its immediate surroundings comprised of swamps, cattle ranches, and orange groves. When state and federal funding for highway construction opened up in the mid1950s, progrowth movers and shakers saw a golden opportunity; through a series of negotiations, backroom deals, newspaper editorials, and other classic statehouse maneuvers, it was eventually decided that two new major roads, the eastwest, TampatoDaytona Beach Interstate4 (I4) and

51 Emerson, Chad Denver. Project Future: The Inside Story Behind the Creation of Walt Disney World. Ayefour Publishing, 2010. Pages 823.

the northsouth, MiamitoTallahassee Florida’s Turnpike, would intersect near

Orlando, at the meeting point of Orange and Osceola counties.52

Disney, still actively on the lookout for their wouldbe East Coast location,

took notice; after all, Disneyland’s Anaheim location had largely been selected due to

the property’s proximity to the Santa Ana Freeway, and the lack of entertainment

competition around it. On November 22, 196353 a private plane ride with numerous

Disney higherups flew high above the intersection, prompting Walt to lean over and

say “that’s it.” The company began a cloakanddagger operation worthy of a Cold

War era spy movie, involving nom de guerres, dummy corporations, rerouted telephone calls to headquarters, and even oversight by a former member of the

World War II era Office of Strategy Services, the precursor of the CIA54 . Secrecy was vital; if word leaked out that a large company, let alone one as famous and highly regarded as Disney, was looking to buy empty land in central Florida, speculators would swoop in and drive up prices before Walt could even raise an eyebrow. It took a great deal of surveying, negotiating, and haggling with landowners, many of whom did not even live on their central Florida properties, but Disney eventually purchased a tract of land in central Florida encompassing southern Orange and northern Osceola counties that made clear just how grand Walt’s ambitions were;

52 Fogelsong, Richard E. Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando. New Haven, CT: Yale University Publishing, 2001. Pages 1623. It was never the sole intent of Orlando’s business community to dive headlong into tourism, as the highway construction was intended to draw in a larger, more diverse economy. 53 Obviously, today November 22, 1963 is infamous for a very different reason. Needless to say, what should have been a celebratory plane ride back to California for the Disney executives turned deadly quiet and somber when the news came through the radio of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. 54 Emerson, Chad Denver. Project Future Pages 3440. …

while Disneyland Park totaled 160 acres off the Southern California freeways, this

Florida Project would encompass 27,400 acres of land between Orlando and

55 Kissimmee.

The entire operation went about as well as Disney could have hoped, a

brilliant exercise in control over covert corporate operations, with only a single

hiccup. Despite their control, secrecy, and good fortune, some within central Florida

still suspected that Disney might be the mysterious land buyer. By 1965, almost all

of the land had been acquired, but a typical corporate invitation to Disneyland

extended to the nation’s newspapers that year was inadvertently sent to Emily

Bavar, a journalist for the Orlando SentinelStar. As he usually did, Walt played the gregarious host to the journalists, all while hiding his secret “Florida Room” which contained a map of Disney’s land acquisitions and was closed off to all but the most essential Disney employees. However, Walt was not prepared for Bavar to ask if he knew anything about the purchase; his stumbling answer, a rarity for the great showman, gave the SentinelStar all it needed to guess that the secret buyer was, indeed, Disney.56 While this did drive some remaining land prices up, Disney nevertheless settled their final deals quickly; no matter, the schedule had simply been moved up by a few months.

While most who heard the news must have assumed that Disney’s involvement signaled the arrival of a Disneyland theme park in Florida, questions still abounded; why on Earth would Disney be in the market for over 27,000 acres of

55 Foglesong, Richard E., Married to the Mouse...Pages 4042 56 Editorial Staff. “We Say: ‘Mystery’ Industry is Disney.” Orlando SentinelStar. Front page. October 24, 1965.

land, and largely empty land, at that? A November 14, 1965 press conference at

Orlando’s Cherry Plaza Hotel provided few answers, but set the rumor mill buzzing;

Disney, seated next to his brother Roy and Florida governor Haydon Burns, was not

forthcoming with direct answers, but did repeatedly emphasize that this new

project would not be referred to as “Disneyland” (only once did he refer to the

project as “a Disney World”), with hints that the company’s work would extend

beyond the construction of a Disney theme park and resort and into something

larger, which might require special help from the Floridian government even

57 beyond the construction of expanded highway access to the property.

Just one year later, however, the questions began to be answered. On October

27, 1966, Walt Disney filmed himself as host of one of his regular programs,

Disneyland USA, which emphasized new developments and ideas being conceived by 58 WED Enterprises. The show began like many before it, but eventually took a turn

that few could have expected, as so few had been made aware of the big project to

come. The episode begins with various shots of Disneyland in action, with narration

detailing the technologies put to use at the park. Chief among the developments

57 “Walt Disney’s Florida Press Conference ” video. Of note here is that, while … Governor Burns voices his full support for Disney’s project and even hints at calling a special session of the Florida legislature to deal with its ramifications, Burns does not come off as comprehending the full scope of what Disney has in mind. This hints at the overall secrecy of the EPCOT project just one year before it would be unveiled to the public, and also lays bare just how eager Florida politicians were to reel Disney in at any cost. 58 Disneyland USA, Recorded October 27, 1966 The following section here is an … analysis of the episode, which is 25 minutes in length and is broken into an opening narration centered on the work of WED at Disneyland; Walt Disney showing off the scope of the Florida Project; and finally a lengthy, partly animated demonstration of what EPCOT was, as of 1966, intended to be.

cited, however, is Disneyland’s transportation fleet of buses, trains, coaches, boats,

monorails, and even submarines. Such developments, the narrator says, are

designed with safety, utility, and efficiency in mind for people who use them, and

attributes their success to WED Enterprises’ willingness to try new ideas, discard

whatever does not work, and continually strive to perfect what does. This serves to

highlight WED’s ability not simply to break any molds, but to create entirely new

ones, as no establishment like Disneyland had ever been constructed before, and, to

that point, none had been constructed since. In the era of the highway and the

personal automobile becoming royalty in American culture, Disneyland could

justifiably claim the mantle of America’s most notable mass transit advocate.

Near the fiveminute mark, the narration trumpets the accolades Disneyland

has received not only from the general public, 340 million of whom the buses, boats,

monorails, and trains had served since Disneyland’s opening in 1955, but also from

professional planners and architects. Citing the 1963 Urban Design Conference at

Harvard, the narrator recites the words of James W. Rouse, whose planned city of

Columbia, Maryland still ranks among the top ten in CNN/Money Magazine’s top one 59 hundred American small cities to live in. While acting as keynote speaker at the

Conference, Rouse cited Disneyland as “the greatest piece of urban design in

60 America today,” owing to its ability to usefully and efficiently fulfill its g oals, continually develop and refine itself, and to simultaneously realize its role as a

59 CNN Money Magazine. “Best Places to Live: Money’s List of America’s Best Small Cities”. August 2008 issue. Accessed April 16, 2014. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bplive/2008/top100/ 60 Koenig, David, Realityland , page 22 …

45 capitalistic marketplace of goods and services while still setting an exemplary bar when working to meet the needs and comforts of its millions of guests, most of whom held it in high esteem. Unstated in the episode is that much of this was owed to Walt’s guiding, if controlling, hand over the park’s proceedings, and his willingness and ability to alter the park to suit guests’ wants and needs when such changes became necessary.

Afterward, the narration gives the great reveal before throwing the presentation over to Walt Disney himself: that this mysterious Florida Project will officially take on the name “Disney World”, reflecting its size and scope. Disney takes over for the next seven minutes or so, illustrating the size the Florida property, and offering a broad outline of what the company wishes to see built there. Across the

43 square miles of space (“Twice the size of the island of Manhattan!” exclaims a clearly delighted Disney, standing against the giant map on the wall and using himself as a measuring scale) was to be a variety of locations: to the north, a theme park and vacation resort area that by itself would be five times the size of

Disneyland; to the south, an “airport of the future” for out of state guests, with a visitors’ center nearby that all guests would filter through; an industrial research and development park with space for various American companies to open up labs in, a clear nod to Walt’s long held fascination with technological research and development centers; and a monorail system running the length of the property, connecting each. All of these on their own would prove to be the “most exciting and challenging” project undertaken by Walt Disney Productions.

However, Walt continues: “The most exciting, by far the most important part in fact the heart of everything [at Disney World] will be our Experimental … … Prototype Community of Tomorrow.” Walking over to a large illustration of a circular city composed of what appeared to be a radiating pattern of progressively larger wheels beginning with a compact center, with spokes flowing outward from that center, Walt formally introduces EPCOT, a planned city that would be a testing ground and demonstration space for new ideas and inventions by American companies. As if they were not illustrated already, it is here that Disney’s influences come into even sharper focus, and his goals for the future of urban America become clear; to Disney, the best way to serve the public need would not be through trying to cure what was wrong with existing cities, not to tear things down and cause or create conflicts or unintended, unplanned consequences, but to “start from scratch on virgin land”, like his large expanse of forests, swamps, and groves in Florida, and start entirely anew, which would be done here using the Disneyland “mold making” model to change the very nature of the modern urban space. This vision quickly brings to mind the creative destruction concepts of planners and officials like Robert

Moses, but with a crucial distinction. Moses was always willing to tear apart older neighborhoods, build new concepts in their place, and surround them with landscapes and infrastructure that fundamentally altered their nature; when he had the opportunity he struck out to create an entirely new vision of urbanism on the ashes of the Queens landfill that he would see transformed into the 1939 and 1964

World’s Fair grounds, Flushing MeadowsCorona Park. Yet even that landfill was not the “virgin land” that Walt Disney was referring to; after all, alterations in Queens

Above: Walt’s own original Florida sketches kept petalshaped EPCOT at the center. Below: Disney before a more formal illustration of EPCOT and its Radial Plan. Walt Disney’s Rough Sketch for EPCOT and Disney in Front of Radial Plan Concept Art. Digital images. Designing Disney. Accessed April 20, 2014. http://www.designingdisney.com/bookreview/waltandpromiseprogresscity

48 led to disturbances and possible conflicts with nearby Queens residents, with traffic patterns into and out from Manhattan, and even with those living downwind in

Brooklyn. In the case of EPCOT, there would be no older neighborhoods, no established cultural spaces to contend over, and no preexisting city ordinances that could potentially limit his desire to tinker with and perfect his model city: a constant

“state of becoming”, Disney says. Plus, just as the enormous size of the Disney World property itself was meant to ward off encroachment by symptoms of the AntiCity,

EPCOT’s location near the center of the property further ensured that no unplanned elements would take root around its periphery, and thus would not hamper any planning for further developing the city itself.

Having stated the philosophy behind EPCOT, Disney introduces the longest part of the episode: an animated look at how EPCOT would function upon completion. Not surprisingly, the soundtrack underneath Disney begins intoning a slower version of “Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow”, which inevitably becomes the leitmotif of this wouldbe real life Progress City. What follows is ten minutes of narrated animation detailing the thorough planning behind the city. The overall design is referred to as the “Radial Plan”, reflective of the aforementioned pattern of circular developments radiating from a central core. The Radial Plan is a concept familiar to anyone who has seen previous Disney construction projects, but here it is designed with urban life in mind; the circular patterns are four “spheres of activity” radiating outward from the concentrated, more traditionally urban, commercecentric core, surrounded first by a band of highrise apartments, and then a wide greenbelt of trees, parks, and recreational areas, flowing into the largest

49 area, the lowdensity, suburbanstyle housing neighborhoods. Indeed it was familiar; the overall wheelandspoke appearance of the Radial Plan bore a noticeable resemblance to the layout of Disneyland itself, with its castledominated central plaza branching off into the walkways leading to its various themed areas.

In the first circle, the city core perhaps best reflects Victor Gruen’s cellular developments’ influence on Disney, but as with Moses’ concepts, Gruen’s visions are also taken a step further. The core, a large scale Gruenesque, 50 acre malllike community center, would contain office towers, hotels, theaters, nightlife, even themed shopping areas modeled after foreign countries, as well as some some

Disneylandesque attractions, typically shows instead of rides, aimed at visiting tourists. At its center would be a 30story “cosmopolitan hotel”, underneath which would be the city’s underground central transit center; the hotel structure would serve as the city’s “wienie” orienting structure, just as Sleeping Beauty Castle at

Disneyland did. Most shockingly of all, and reflected in the script of the Progress City ending at Carousel of Progress, is that the entire core would be enclosed via a clear screen dome and climate controlled. For Walt’s vision, “the pedestrian is king”, and a large, enclosed downtown district (or, in this case, city center) would ensure that the tropical Florida humidity and bountiful precipitation would never hamper a work day or a pleasure trip to the core’s shops and attractions. However, this was designed not just for climate comfort, but also to avoid the pitfalls that had haunted

Gruen’s dreams when he saw what the American shopping mall had become, as enclosing the area would create one massive pedestrian zone by completely disallowing carbonemitting motor vehicles, and thus parking lots and other

“AntiCity” features, anywhere near the core’s surface.61 The only vehicles in the

core would be electric vehicles on elevated platforms and tracks, in this case a

monorail line and an expanded PeopleMover, converted from a Disneyland ride into

a working form of urban mass transportation.

Nevertheless, cars and trucks would still exist in EPCOT. However, they

would exist below the city, in what may have been a nod to Gruen’s plans for the scrapped Washington, DC World’s Fair bid and his belief in separating pedestrian and living spaces from vital utilities. Disney and his WED employees clearly had motor vehicles in mind when designing EPCOT, and for that matter when choosing

Disney World’s location, and why wouldn’t they? As previously mentioned, the civic leaders of Orlando and Orange county had worked overtime and shook every hand necessary to attract federal funding for highways through their region, and as much as Walt clearly preferred mass transit to highways, there was no getting around the fact that through the postWar era the United State was a nation of automobiles and drivers. The EPCOT video makes note of the city’s proximity to Interstate 4 and

Sunshine State Parkway/Florida’s Turnpike (now Reagan Turnpike) and predicts a constant flow of cars and trucks through the underground roads which, again according to the video, will never contain a traffic light, as they will run in a circular,

62 not a grid shaped, pattern. Residents of EPCOT, the vast majority of whom were

61 The enclosed city hub might also have been reflective of a trend toward climate controlled spaces and domes in city design. Gruen’s malls certainly apply here, but 1965 also saw the construction of the Houston Astrodome, a sports venue that begat many roofed, allweather imitators around the continent. 62 Residents would be able to drive in EPCOT; however, they would be relegated to a one way, circular road that would feed directly into the highway connections, Disney working under the assumption that most residents, as Disney employees, would

51 expected to be employees on Disney property, would rely on the monorail or the

PeopleMover to get around the city itself, both within the core and outward toward the greenbelt, singlefamily unit neighborhoods, and further for their onsite work commutes, with their cars only expected for “weekend getaways” and only permitted on roads set aside for automobile travel leading into the underground routes.

Reduction of the usage of automobiles ties in directly to the greenbelt circle beyond the city’s core. While the dense urban core would be ringed with high capacity luxury apartments, the greenbelt would act as both a sort of public commons as well as a measure to preserve some of the natural green space within the city’s confines, a slumprevention tactic no doubt born from the theories of

Ebenezer Howard and his Garden Cities. While the narration voiceover does not emphasize the potential ecological benefits of reduced automobile use, it does make clear that the green space will serve both a practical and psychological purpose in

EPCOT, as it will be the location of the city’s schools, athletic centers, churches, and other similar civic institutions, along with public parks and hiking trails so that city residents would never feel far away from the natural world.63 It is difficult to predict if the greenbelt might have led to more problems in the future than first believed, for example possible conflicts over encroachment of the dense core area should the likely only be using their cars for weekend getaways. The traffic plan seems directly inspired by Gruen’s eventual design for the downtown hub of Fresno, CA, from the film referenced earlier. 63 It is fair to say that Walt Disney, despite his urbanist dreams, had a great interest in preserving natural spaces, which was reflected in his love of skiing and his commitment to producing a series of nature documentaries known as TrueLife Adventures throughout the 1950s.

city grow over time, but greenbelts were nonetheless a widely accepted feature of

many of Disney’s cityplanning contemporaries.

Beyond the greenbelt lay the single family unit residential neighborhoods, a

nod to the type of homes so in vogue since the construction of the original

Levittown, but arranged in separate neighborhoods like flower petals ringing the

city center, ending in what might be described as enormous cul de sacs rather than branching off into a narrow grid system or into winding, meandering patterns found in older suburbs. This design would create an intriguing living arrangement: the residential homes would line the “flower petals” and ring the cul de sacs, but rather than follow the standard layout of frontfacing garages leading to narrow sidewalks

and wide streets to accommodate carusing commuters, families in EPCOT’s

suburban zone would have their garages located in the rear of the home. Their driveways would feed out into EPCOT’s curved periphery road system and thus

leave the front of the properties car and traffic free, making for an enormous

amount of space that could be used for multiple purposes: wider sidewalks,

additional green spaces and small parks, safe space for children to walk and play,

and additional commons areas for neighborhood events and gatherings. If the

automobilecentric suburb had isolated the American family, then EPCOT would

seek to make it social once more. To that end, each neighborhood node would have

its own PeopleMover station, ensuring a mass transit connection to the entire city.

The potential impact of PeopleMovers being near to homes was enormous: Kenneth

T. Jackson’s seminal Crabgrass Frontier argues that a key reason for the popular rise of the automobile was that, unlike typical city rail lines, cars could handle

“perpendicular” street travel, while trains and trolleys could only manage parallel

lines outward from the city core, thus limiting viable spaces and necessitating car

travel between station stops. While the monorail would be EPCOT’s parallel track

for longer travel, the constantloading PeopleMover held the key to solving this

problem of the perpendicular, and perhaps the key to reducing automobile

overreliance.64

What’s made perfectly clear in EPCOT’s planning is that everything is

intended to have its distinct place: business, commerce, and culture in the center,

immediately surrounded by highrise apartments; churches, schools, parks, trails,

lakes, and community and recreation centers on the greenway; and walkways,

smaller parks, and suburban style housing in the residential sphere, with

PeopleMover stations never far away and carrying the projected 20,000 residents,

all renters so as to avoid any threats to Disney’s direct ownership of the land, to

work, home, and to points beyond. Even employment would have its distinct space:

while some residents would commute on foot or on the PeopleMover and work

within the city itself, the bulk of the population would commute by monorail to

either the theme park and resort area in the north, or to the industrial research and

development park to the south. In this way Disney could, he theorized, eliminate

unemployment: every adult resident of EPCOT would be an employee at one of the

locales on Disney World property.

64 Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Page 183.

One final aspect would set EPCOT apart, both as a planned community and as a location that lived up to the “Experimental” part of its title. Part of a resident’s agreement when living in EPCOT would involve a pact to allow the city government, largely operated by Disney, to regularly update the furnishings and technology in their home, to keep up to date with the latest innovations. While this aspect better lines up with the “Tomorrow” part of the EPCOT acronym, it served more than one purpose. Every guest to the Disney World vacation resort would, according to Walt’s original plan, have to enter the property in its southern portion, either by car or arriving in the “airport of the future”, and then travel by monorail through EPCOT, as well as the industrial park, to reach the theme park and hotels, and travel back through it on their way out. This meant that the residents of EPCOT would, in effect, be on display for resort guests to observe in their places of work, play, and living spaces; a sort of larger, amplified version of the consumerist future on display that was available at the 1964 World’s Fair for patrons to interact with firsthand.

Disney’s ultimate hope was that these guests would observe, mentally take notes, and bring the EPCOT concept home with them when their vacation ended, ready to experiment with and apply some of what they had seen in their own communities.

As if to drive this notion home, the episode ends on a vision of a future EPCOT surrounded by nearreplicas a few miles apart, creating not just a vision for a new city, but an entire metropolis system of nearidentical concept city units. Just how

“on stage” a typical EPCOT resident would be for the tourist audience is never specified; this is not surprising, as such matters would undoubtedly be a source of contention before the city could be completed as planned.

In EPCOT, Walt Disney had seemingly set the blueprint of his dreams. He had married what must have seemed like the best ideas of men like Howard, Moses, and

Gruen, such as building anew, planning every detail of a new urban community, embracing commerce and residential comfort and convenience, and simultaneously situated himself to avoid the problems that had plagued those earlier planners. By building on unused land, he would not be bulldozing preexisting communities; by having a property as large as Disney World, he would have a buffer to keep away the dreaded “AntiCity”; by creating proprietary transit technology, he could control the flow of traffic in all its forms; by making EPCOT a company town, he would ensure full employment and would have a high level of control over all aspects of the city’s operations. Additionally, despite concerns voiced by older brother Roy Disney, the more financialminded of the two, Walt held firm to the idea that Walt Disney

Productions would have sole ownership and control of the project, rejecting ideas such as potential business mergers with companies like General Electric and

65 Westinghouse to ease the financial burden. These Modernist visions thrived on control over disparate, sometimes chaotically divided factions within communities, and all Disney needed to see his own vision through was the permission and cooperation of the Floridian government to grant him as much direct control over the Disney World property as possible, to entrust Disney, a private entity, with the type of public benefits and responsibilities needed to exercise the power necessary to see EPCOT become a reality.

65 Mannheim. Walt Disney and the Quest... Pages 9495. Although mergers were out of the question for Walt, he certainly did call on his corporate relationships to seek out sponsorships to help pay the freight for EPCOT.

Shortly after this episode’s completion, Walt Disney Productions would be granted that control.

Walt Disney would not live to see nor wield it.

And When It Becomes a Reality Walt Disney World Resort, Reedy Creek, EPCOT … Center, and the postWalt Years

Walt Disney, a long time smoker, succumbed to lung cancer in December of

1966. Unofficial accounts speak of Walt lying in his hospital bed shortly before his death, staring at the ceiling, still tracing the outlines of his City of Tomorrow by using the dots in the tiles to picture the radial patterns and spokelike transit

66 connections. Older brother Roy, despite his usual role as the levelheaded f inancier, nonetheless wished to honor Walt’s hopes and wishes following his death to whatever degree he felt was financially feasible. Putting off his planned retirement and taking over as chairman of Walt Disney Productions, Roy first officially changed the name of the Florida property to “Walt Disney World”, a clear message not only made in tribute to his younger brother, but also as an emphatic public statement that the entire Florida Project and EPCOT were Walt’s babies, and that they would be developed while adhering to Walt’s vision as closely as possible. Roy then set about ensuring and financing the construction of Phase I of the property: the theme park and resort area at the northernmost corner, with creative ideas stemming almost exclusively from the backlog of projects Walt left behind. A successful resort could ensure a steady stream of visitors and revenue, and thus create a potential

66 Koenig, David. Realityland... Page 38

Above: a view of a fragment of the Progress City model, currently located in the PeopleMover ride in the Magic Kingdom in Orlando, which shows the dense central hub surrounded by a green belt. Remaining Fragment of Original “Progress City” Model. Digital image. Yesterland. Accessed September 22, 2015. http://www.yesterland.com/imagestomorrowland/progress_citywdw.jpg Below: an aerial view of the finished EPCOT Center Future World area highlights the park’s use of radial lines, the exterior pavilions acting like satellite developments, and the importance of the monorail line as a mass transit option. Aerial View of EPCOT Center’s Future World. Digital Image. MickeyXtreme. Accessed September 22, 2015. http://mickeyxtreme.com/images1/News2012/06122012Epcot.jpg

market to attract private companies for sponsorships and showcases when EPCOT

was finally realized.

This would primarily be accomplished thanks to a major Disney victory in

the Florida legislature. Following months of lobbying and negotiations, plus public

showings of the EPCOT pitch film to resident Floridians and government, including

67 federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) , officials, by spring of 1967 Disney

Productions reached an agreement with the Florida legislature to form a

“publicprivate” enterprise known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District, a

governing jurisdiction that would give the company control over fire protection,

environmental regulations, building codes, utilities, and road construction on the

Walt Disney World property in exchange for a full tax freight paid to local and state

68 Floridian governments. Though Reedy Creek was technically independent of Walt

Disney Productions, Disney, as the largest (and only) landowner within the District

was able to appoint the committee members who would oversee operations, and

even vet and choose the few dozen permanent residents who were required to live

there, thus allowing Disney to switch between private (Disney Productions) and

public (Reedy Creek) entities depending on the situation and which arm would

better benefit the company . Such powers would allow Disney to avoid state and

local oversight on matters pertaining to park, hotel, city, and general onproperty

construction, water drainage, sewage treatment, and numerous other utilities;

though rather than using this power to cut corners in these fields, Disney seemed

67 Mannheim, Steve. Quest for Community Pages 9596 … 68 Foglesong, Richard E. Married to the Mouse Pages 138145. …

59 much more concerned with being able to develop Walt Disney World with high construction standards, just without going through any state or local bureaucracies.

With regards to EPCOT, however, it also meant that Disney could keep residents from having too strong a say in the future city’s governance; despite toying with the idea of allowing open democracy in EPCOT, Walt, working off commissioned feasibility reports, wound up editing company memos to refer to residents as

“tenants”, emphasizing their nonpermanent status and lack of voting power in the special purpose district, a flaw that seemed to drift by the eager Florida legislature unnoticed. Disney did plan on a possible second community for retirees who wished to purchase land rather than rent, but given the timing of this planning in fall of

1966, Walt’s failing health slammed the brakes on exploring it any further.69

Special purpose districts were certainly nothing new in American city planning by the late 1960s, but if the arrangement created with Reedy Creek seemed lopsided in the favor of Disney, it was due to the incredible leverage “The

Mouse” held over Orange and Osceola counties, as well as the city of Orlando. As of

1967 Disney was still at leisure to sell their Florida land and move on if they did not receive terms they felt were favorable enough; Orlando and the surrounding counties, meanwhile, were still desperate for the huge private investment and future tourism dollars Disney represented for the thensleepy central Florida region, a situation all too familiar even in modern day American communities.

Phase I of construction was completed in October of 1971 and encompassed the vacation resort area of Walt Disney World, comprised of the Magic Kingdom

69 Mannheim, Steve. Walt Disney and the Quest Page 113. …

theme park (an expanded version of Disneyland in Anaheim, nearly double the

original’s acreage), a manmade lake called the Seven Seas Lagoon made from a

large scale project to partially drain and clean out the murky waters of Bay Lake,

and a ring of hotel properties and golf courses around the lagoon, all connected by

monorail so that resort guests would not feel compelled to use their cars while on

Disney property. It was clear early on that Disney was interested in guests looking

beyond the theme park; the entire resort area was built like a planned community,

complete with waste management and mass transportation. The company even

70 wound up constructing the Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village in 1975, an open air

shopping space at the southern end of the property intended to eventually include

residential units and townhouses connected to the Village by PeopleMovers. Said

Marty Sklar approximately ten years into the resort’s operating life:

There was now the whole Walt Disney World infrastructure that had been built (including) fortythree miles of winding drainage canals nine acres of underground corridors called “utilidors” (that) serve … as an urban basement, providing sewers, pipes, cables, workshops, … garbage disposal technical innovations such as the modular construction … 71 of hotel rooms, which are built on the ground and hoisted into place by crane

70 Lake Buena Vista, FL, and Bay Lake, FL, are the two “municipalities” that comprise the Reedy Creek Improvement District. The Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village, later known as Disney Village, would for a time become a hub for gourmet restaurants, jazz music, craft beer and quality wine stores, and a mix of shops that included highend boutiques; all these things were revelations to many Orlando residents, as preDisney the town had never been much of a cultural hub. 71 This is a reference to the Contemporary Resort next to the Magic Kingdom; this process of room making is called “modular construction”, meant to be a revolutionary means of producing cheaper, wellinsulated rooms, prewired so that new rooms can be inserted and “clicked in” like jigsaw puzzle pieces, a sort of mass production of hotel rooms. The Contemporary Resort was designed with an Aframe shape so that the rooms could easily be placed in with a forklift, and so that Monorail lines could pass through its lobby atrium. It also allowed for rooms to be easily removed if Disney felt they had to be updated. Given that Disney had no

Above: Contemporary Resort, with Monorail Line and Mary Blair Designed Mural. EverythingMouse.com. http://www.everythingmouse.com/waltdisneyworldcontemporaryresortwhicharethebestrooms Below: Pasant, Matt. Spaceship Earth and EPCOT Center Monorail. Flickr.com. Digital Images. Both accessed April 20, 2014. http://www.flickr.com/photos/pasant/3012383475/.

hotelier experience before the opening of the original Walt Disney World hotels, the risks and creativity involved in the Contemporary are especially impressive.

America’s first allelectronic telephone system; the introduction … in the United States of the Swedish AVAC trash disposal system … and many more forwardlooking systems that will move urban 72 technology into the twentyfirst century.

In other words: while the city of EPCOT was not in the immediate offing, Walt

Disney World, as it existed, and as it was planned going forward, in spirit already was EPCOT. Mainstream attention came quickly; even David Brinkley gave a special report soon after the resort’s opening suggesting that Disney be turned to as one of

America’s greatest outlets for new urban ideas and systems (“don’t laugh”, Brinkley advises) thanks to their ability to get things done quickly, efficiently, and to the liking of the public, his words carrying echoes of James Rouse’s when discussing the original Disneyland, and once more not at all unfounded at a time when too many

73 American cities faced economic and social neglect. The company’s emphasis was clear: despite simply existing as a selfdescribed “Vacation Kingdom” resort getaway, Walt Disney World was still a model for the future of urban living in the

United States, and would draw on and implement many of the ideas that had been developed with EPCOT in mind.

By the mid1970’s, E. Cardon (“Card”) Walker, Walt’s heir apparent on the creative side of the company, had taken over operating Walt Disney Productions. He wasn’t long into his tenure when he began feeling public pressure concerning

72 Beard, Richard R. Walt Disney’s EPCOT: Creating the New World of Tomorrow. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1982. Page 15 73 David Brinkley Talks about Disney World. NBC. YouTube. Accessed March 30, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Aj7fYJocyE With the Contemporary Resort and a moving monorail as a backdrop, Brinkley cites Peter Blake’s suggestion that Disney take over future planning in New York City.

EPCOT; after all, the promise of the wouldbe City of Tomorrow was the key that had

opened up the unprecedented levels of power and autonomy that the Floridian

government had granted to Disney and the Reedy Creek Improvement District.

74 Walker felt the political winds blowing, and began to get the ball rolling on EPCOT.

However, for reasons never fully stated but likely having to do with flagging finances

in a company that had become far more conservative than it had been under the

riskembracing Walt Disney, EPCOT the city would not come to be, even though

much of their privatepublic power was contingent on its creation. Rather, the

company exercised their authority within Reedy Creek to “redefine” EPCOT into a

theme park that would serve as a “permanent World’s Fair”, drawing inspiration

75 from the 19641965 affair in Queens.

The shift caused confusion; after all, EPCOT, Progress City, had been the focal

selling point of Walt Disney World when the nowfamous episode of Disneyland USA had been filmed, and was the key component in getting Florida’s legislature to grant

Disney the level of autonomy it received in Reedy Creek. Unable to fully or deftly

articulate the retreat away from making the city, Walker and many Imagineers fell

74 Koenig, David, Realityland... Pages 156158. The pressure not only came from repeated press questioning about when EPCOT would become a reality (the city’s construction was a key component in Disney Productions and Reedy Creek being given so much oversight of the property’s utilities), but, interestingly, it sprang forward due to an expose by a writer for Playboy magazine in 1974, who questioned the creativity and integrity of a Disney company that had seemingly become complacent and far less creative without Walt around, as the company hadn’t had many original or nonsequel ideas since Disney’s death in 1966. 75 Foglesong, Married to the Mouse , page 103 – The official reason for the shift … from EPCOT, the city, to EPCOT Center is not fully known, but most speculation points to financial concerns and an internal belief that residents would not take well to being “on display” for tourists visiting the resort, as previously posited.

back on emphasizing the fluid, “never finished” and ”state of becoming” nature of

EPCOT, leaving some journalists rightly skeptical of their claim that their new

76 direction was one Walt would have wanted. Yet the eventual park, christened

EPCOT Center, was a rousing success in multiple ways when it opened in October of

1982. Its name was a clever way around having to build the city, as “Center” shifted

EPCOT from a physical to a philosophical and branding concept, the park simply

serving as the larger concept’s base of operations.

Accessible via an extension to the monorail system, which brought its total

track length to nearly 15 miles, from the Walt Disney World Transportation Center,

EPCOT Center wound up an hourglassshaped park of 300 acres, more than double

the acreage of the Magic Kingdom. EPCOT Center would contain two themed areas:

Future World would be at the bottom of the hourglass and feature enormous

Modernist architecture pavilions focused on specific issues like communications

(Spaceship Earth), energy sources and usage (Universe of Energy), conservation (The Land), ocean life and technology (The Living Seas), transportation (World of Motion), human creativity (Journey Into Imagination), human wellness (Wonders of Life), and futurism (Horizons), all backed by corporate sponsors who would be granted show space to demonstrate new products for potential consumers visiting the park. At the

top of the hourglass would be the World Showcase, a carryover from Walt’s original

EPCOT city center, where different countries would sponsor pavilions featuring

films, attractions, restaurants, and shops with goods from the sponsoring nation.

Each section would contain consistent signage, giving it a sleek, unified appearance,

76 Married to the Mouse page 103 …

and Future World in particular was designed with a radiating, circular pattern not

unlike the original EPCOT Radial Plan. This form had most of the attractions ringing

a central area anchored by a twobuilding pavilion called CommuniCore (short for “Community Core”), structures with ample showcase and demonstration space for

new technology and guest outreach that allowed early1980s guests a chance to

interact with personal computers and touch screens, modern news and

communications, robotics, and even included an educator resource center that

offered school lesson plans based on the other pavilions found in the park. While the

park idea may still seem a bit of a cop out by the postWalt company, the emphasis

on guests bringing the ideas and technology of EPCOT home with them did seem an

earnest attempt to honor their old boss.

Thus while the city did not come to pass, there was still support for the

77 permanent World’s Fair concept, even in the editorial pages of the Orlando Sentinel 78 and on the floor of the Florida legislature. There was no denying that enormous

effort had gone into crafting the park both physically and ideologically; the original

EPCOT vision was visible in the authentic artistic and cultural offerings of World

Showcase, as well as the engineering and architectural feats in Future World that

created a sense that a grand future had arrived. The park contained marvels like

77 Editorial Board. “Supercali”(editorial). Orlando Sentinel Star, October 3, 1978. The board of the paper still viewed EPCOT Center as an extension and indirect fulfillment of Walt Disney’s dream city, though it remains to be seen how much of that support came from visions of larger crowds and more regional revenue. 78 Married to the Mouse page 104 Tallahassee seemed thrilled at the prospective … tourism boom of a second theme park, and included some conservatives trumpeting its showcase of American free enterprise during the Cold War, and more liberallyinclined members enjoying its mission statement of building understanding and education between cultures.

Spaceship Earth, the communications pavilion and the “wienie” of EPCOT Center, a completely round geodesic sphere standing 180 feet high and not dissimilar to the globes found at the center of both the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs, or the Montreal

Biosphere from Expo 67; a pavilion roof coated entirely with solar cells at the

Universe of Energy, partially powering the ride vehicles within; and The Living Seas pavilion held what was, at the time, the world’s largest aquarium. These engineering accomplishments and many others seemed to indicate a commitment to the principles, at least, that had shaped Walt’s dream city. Much like the proposed city, the park was meticulously planned with no minor detail spared, from the windows and roofs of the provincial architecture emulated in the western half of the France pavilion all the way down to the authentic geometric ornamentation tilework on tucked away fountains in the back alley of the eventual Morocco pavilion. Still, while the public response was largely positive, it would be fair to call Disney out for swerving expectations and utilizing their privatepublic powers to facilitate the

“redefinition” of EPCOT, all while its promotional materials disingenuously drove home the notion that EPCOT Center was the fulfillment of Walt’s “final” or “greatest dream”79 , as if the park, and not the city, had been the goal all along.

Despite the apparent internal fears over the cost of constructing the city of

EPCOT, the theme park version nonetheless bore a staggering price tag; a preliminary $600 million budget in the mid1970’s had ballooned to $1.4 billion as

79 The Walt Disney Company. EPCOT Center: A Souvenir Program. YouTube. Accessed July 14, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P27_KzJ4ZiI&index=6&list=PLbqKcf2xpShCtT jyis3b9kfql5qJSAT

The signage on the pavilions at EPCOT Center was significant for its use in creating a unified whole out of different parts. The logos and signage signified order and control in the park, and attempting to link together seemingly unrelated topics (e.g. the World of Motion transportation/automobile pavilion and the agriculture/conservationbased The Land). Interestingly, the logos and unified theming and font was done away with during the middle years of the Michael Eisner era at Disney, but with the recent 30th anniversary of the park they have seen a small comeback, hinting that the park may shift its focus once again. EPCOT Center Future World Pavilion Signage. Digital Image. Mice Chat. October 2, 2010. Accessed April 10, 2015. http://micechat.com/forums/waltdisneyworldresort/144456horizonswhatyouneversaw2.html

opening day approached in 1982, making EPCOT Center the largest private

80 construction project undertaken up to that point in time. While the public, both the

81 local Floridian and national, wound up taking to the park quite well, its

construction costs, along with continued losses in Disney’s stillstruggling film

division that still could not get out of its postWalt funk in the 1980s, set the stage

for a monumental change in Disney management, as Walt’s old guard found itself

82 surrounded by corporate raiders eager to buy pieces of the company that could

eventually be leveraged into full control and a hostile takeover. To avoid this

outcome and to ensure a level of order and cohesion over their relinquishing of

power, by 1984 Walt’s hand picked heirs eventually elected to sell control of the

company to a dynamic entertainment consortium headed by exParamount Pictures

executive Michael Eisner and former Warner Brothers vice president Frank Wells.

Upon the sale’s completion Eisner instantly became the CEO of the company

and initiated a wholesale change in direction that would forever alter the course of

not only Walt Disney World or even just the entire company, but one that would

reshape the entire American media landscape for the next three decades. Michael

Eisner wasn’t entirely uncreative, but his most obvious skills resided in his

entertainment business acumen. Upon his September 1984 takeover he took note of

the growing home video distribution market, leading to Disney becoming a major

80 “EPCOT”. Disney By the Numb3rs, 2007. Accessed April 27, 2014. http://www.disneybythenumbers.com/wdw/page20.html

81 Allen, Jean. “EPCOT Center’s Got More Life, Pizzazz.” Orlando Sun Sentinel, October 13, 1985. 82 Author unknown. “Highlights of Struggle for Disney”. New York Times, June, 12, 1984.

presence on the young and soon to be lucrative VHS format; recommitted the

company’s energies toward its animation department, leading to successful forays

into syndicated animated television series on The Disney Afternoon network block and a veritable renaissance in its animated feature films beginning with The Little Mermaid in 1989; he later set about acquiring Capital Cities/ABC Network and all its properties, including cable stations such as ESPN; and, by the time his tenure with

Disney was over in 2004, the company’s revenues, cash flow, and market value had

83 all grown between 2,0003,000% from their 1984 levels. Eisner made Disney a

media mammoth.

However, this shift in direction toward home video, animation, and network

and cable television and all the properties involved therein was accomplished in

part by moving the company away from the kind of investments and creative risks

that had less to do with mass media and more to with urbanism and other future

technologies, such as the monorail, EPCOT Center, or even the whole of Walt Disney

World. This did not mean Eisner engaged in wholesale neglect of the Florida

property, nor of Disneyrun theme parks; far from it, in fact. Over his twenty years in

charge of the company, Eisner’s regime would oversee the construction two new

theme parks in Florida along with two new water parks, a nightclubcentric

entertainment complex, and an enormous expansion in onsite hotels. Away from

Florida, the Eisner era brought about the Disneyland Paris resort in Europe, a

second theme park for Tokyo Disneyland (Tokyo DisneySea, albeit funded by the

83 Epstein, Edward Jay. “How Did Michael Eisner Make Disney Profitable?” Slate Magazine, September 27, 2005.

Tokyo Land Company like the original 1983 Tokyo Disneyland), an announced park in Hong Kong, and a longanticipated second theme park next to Disneyland in

Anaheim. This was a marked and clear step up in activity for a company that had been accused of becoming pallid and stale at times in the generation following

Walt’s death.

Paradoxically, however, all of this themepark expansion and activity also signified that neither Eisner nor Frank Wells ever knew what, exactly, they had in central Florida. That isn’t to say they didn’t see the profit potential Walt Disney

World possessed, however. One peculiar anecdote has Eisner and Wells, on a tour of the underground utilidors84 of the Magic Kingdom park, seeing firsthand that Walt

Disney World was, as of 1984, the company’s chief source of revenue by tripping over an actual, physical bag of money in a hallway, gained on a particularly

85 profitable day in the park. The lesson learned, Eisner and company quickly set about making changes to further amplify revenues. Under pressure from major stockholders, Eisner threw Disney wholeheartedly into the hotel business, overseeing a veritable boom in onproperty lodgings including many budget priced resorts that would encourage more guests and families to remain within the confines of Walt Disney World and away from Orlando and its many other

84 The famed utilidors are used to hide the Magic Kingdom’s “behind the scenes” areas from guests. For example, the underground hallways not only hold the costume department for park characters and a hidden space where a Mickey actor can take his head off, but it also contains the park’s less sightly utilities. Thus, it serves the purpose of “reducing contradictions”, like the possibility of seeing a science fiction costumed character walking through Frontierland, and fits into the EPCOT plan of keeping utilities underground and away from pedestrians. 85 Realityland , page 250 …

71 entertainment and dining options during their entire vacation stays, a clear step away from the relationship Orlando and Disney had under the old regime.

Disney and Orlando had, at least through the mid1980s, unofficially operated under what some referred to as a “good neighbor” policy, with Disney building enough for its property to thrive, but not to directly compete with Orlando itself as a destination; for a time, Disney even offered shuttle buses that would allow resort guests to go offsite, and would run to nearby destinations such as Sea World and Cape Kennedy.86 This laidback approach to competition would vanish completely during the Eisner era. When word got out in 1989 that Universal Studios was expanding to Orlando with a theme park revolving around film properties; that

Wet n’ Wild waterpark was set to be built along I4 and Orlando’s touristhotbed

International Drive; and that the downtown Orlando Church Street Station clubs and bars were drawing in a large number of adult Disney resort guests, the Eisner regime did not take it lying down. Disney quickly announced, and quickly built, thanks to their ability to duck red tape under the Reedy Creek charter, the film propertybased DisneyMGM Studios theme park, the thrill ridecentric waterpark

Typhoon Lagoon, and a new themednightclub area next to Lake Buena Vista

Shopping Village known as Pleasure Island. Keeping money within the property was now the name of the game.

86 “FoxxFur” (author’s online handle). “The Contemporary Resort Through the 1990s”. Passport to Dreams Old and New blog, September 28, 2015. Accessed October 7, 2015. http://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2015/09/thecontemporaryresortthrough 1990s.html

Within the theme parks themselves, various attractions were updated to

include gift shops near their exits, lowerrevenue specialty item shops were

replaced with more generic Walt Disney World souvenir merchandise stands, and

ticket prices were raised. Meanwhile on the creative side, Eisner encouraged the

Imagineers, whose work he had developed a fascination for, to embrace largerscale,

more “Hollywood”esque storytelling ideas for their rides, like the special

effectsladen Splash Mountain log flume ride, and took that concept even further when he struck a deal to bring in the rights to George Lucas’ Star Wars property for 87 a flight simulator ride, the first of its kind in a theme park. At parks like EPCOT

Center, attractions that had at one point faced criticism for being too slowpaced or

educational were often updated to either become thrill rides or to include

recognizable Disney characters, affiliated celebrities, or other properties, going

against the original 1982 WED Enterprises mandate to give the park its own identity

88 by not even including Mickey Mouse himself in the park!

Thus there is no arguing that Eisner, despite not being a theme park expert,

still saw the profit potential in Walt Disney World. The issue was not so much

neglect, though, as it was the shift in creative energy. The abovementioned Star Wars ride, known as Star Tours, was a keystone ride at the first theme park designed and constructed under the Eisner regime, DisneyMGM Studios, a theme park meant to highlight movie properties and an idealized 1930’s “Hollywood that never was”.

The park, though by and large successful since its 1989 opening, primarily serves to

87 Realityland , page 252 … 88 Fisher, David. “The Secrets of Walt Disney World: Mickey, Mickey Everywhere.” Disney News, Vol. 27, No. 1, December 1991 edition.

73 showcase Disney film properties, and today includes rides featuring Star Wars, Jim Henson’s Muppets, and Pixar films, each of which happen to be properties owned entirely by Disney as of 2016, along with recent Disney animated features. While viewed by many as a cynical swipe at the new Universal Studios theme park down the road from Walt Disney World, the park served more as a visible reminder that

Eisner’s focus was not on citybuilding technology and culture, but on intellectual properties that could turn Disney into a financial and media juggernaut. Parks like

EPCOT Center, meanwhile, experienced a dearth of new ideas; for example, as of this writing the World Showcase still has not had a new nation added since the Morocco pavilion in 1988, an idea already in development before Eisner and Wells took over.

Pleasure Island, the nightclub destination, brought about the end of the serene Lake

Buena Vista Shopping Village; rechristened the Disney Village Marketplace, it lost most of its highend boutiques, restaurants, and cultural offerings that had once wowed sleepy central Florida, and was updated to include a bevy of childfriendly stores and restaurants to draw in the out of town family crowd, as tourists trumped potential future residents. Perhaps more symbolically than anything else,

DisneyMGM Studios (today Disney Hollywood Studios) also opened without an extension to the Monorail track system to allow for easier access, despite being built within very close proximity of the Monorailaccessible EPCOT Center; it became the first theme park on the property designed for access primarily by bus and automobile.

It could be argued that this drive away from the concepts that shaped the original EPCOT city vision was ironically cemented by the opening of a town meant,

74 at least according to the company’s public statements89 , to reflect its original purpose. 1994 saw the establishment of the town of Celebration, Florida, a municipality carved out of the southern tip of the Reedy Creek Improvement

District, and designed, planned, and brought to reality by Disney. In truth,

Celebration, though seen through with great commitment by Disney, was created as a sort of favor toward Osceola county, as all of Walt Disney World’s development up to that point had occurred solely in its Orange county northern half, above I4 and

U.S. 192, leaving Oceola with far less tax revenue.90

Visitors or wouldbe residents expecting EPCOTreborn were in for something very different, however. Celebration was not the company town that

EPCOT would have been, nor was it even a city in the literal sense of the word.

Buoyed by enthusiastic backing from Eisner, to the tune of a $2.5 billion investment for planning and construction and a call to build something that was worthy of the

91 EPCOT legacy , Celebration nevertheless took on the form of a small, quiet, idealized allAmerican suburb of approximately 8,000 residents. Anyone “expecting some kind of EPCOTstyle tram ride” to take them into the town’s core would instead see a downtown with small shops, cafes, and buildings rarely exceeding a few stories in height, hardly the glassenclosed and climatecontrolled metropolitan urban center Disney had envisioned for his Progress City, and more akin to the

89 The Walt Disney Company. Celebration (clip). YouTube. Accessed August 10, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1DCg6zDPlM 90 Foglesong, Richard E. Married to the Mouse Pages 150153. … 91 Frantz, Douglas. Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney’s Brave New Town. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company Publishing, September 9, 1999. Page 23.

th Magic Kingdom’s nostalgic theme park recreation of early 20 century America, 92 Main Street USA.

In fairness, Walt’s original musings to the press concerning the Florida property often included references not only to a prototype City of Tomorrow, but also a desire to build a “City of Yesterday”, perhaps modeled after places like

Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, that could possibly house residents.93

Additionally, in many ways Celebration actually did seem to follow some of the

EPCOT blueprint: its streets embraced radial plan design, it emphasized a pedestrianfriendly town core, and it was made to be filled up with greenways, public parks, narrow streets with wide sidewalks, houses with front porches located near the curb to heighten social interaction, and other design and comfort elements meant to reflect the modern city planning of 1990s New Urbanism.

Yet its departure from embracing the “City of Tomorrow” moniker so sought by Walt Disney in the 1960s can be summed up very succinctly: unlike Walt’s company town, with 20,000 residents commuting via monorail and PeopleMover to their place of work, 91% of employed Celebration residents currently commute,

94 mostly off Disney property, by car. In addition, contrary to the EPCOT plan,

Celebration was a town of homeowners; by making their deal with Osceola county,

Disney had for the first time opened up part of its property to the everyday and

92 Davis, Brandy. “New Urbanism: Cause for Celebration?” Impact Press. April/May 1997 issue. Accessed April 24, 2014. http://www.impactpress.com/articles/aprmay97/celebrat.htm 93 Gennaway, Sam. Walt and the Promise Page 240. … 94 Glaeser, Edward. Triumph of the City. New York, NY: Penguin Press,. 2011. Page 215

Aerial view of Celebration, Florida – Images on previous pages feature the Contemporary Resort, a hotel built using an Aframe design and modularly constructed rooms with a monorail line running through its lobby, and the centerpiece of EPCOT Center, the geodesic sphere Spaceship Earth, again with the monorail line in front of it. The images showcase the early attempts by WED Enterprises to preserve, if not realize, the EPCOT vision for new urban technologies, with the Disney theme parks and hotels as showcase spaces. Meanwhile, the Disneydesigned town of Celebration, realized in 1994, did feature aspects of the EPCOT model such as green space and the Radial Plan, but was never designed to reach a population much beyond 8,000 residents, and never featured the mass public transportation so vital to the EPCOT plan. Disney would sell its controlling interest in Celebration in 2004. Aerial View of Celebration, Florida. Digital image. Word Press (From Eden to Zion). January 13, 2008. Accessed April 23, 2014. http://jeremypryor.wordpress.com/2008/01/13/newurbanismanexperienceinsidethetownofcele bration/

often messy politics of democracy, and had surrendered much of the control the

company had historically treasured in the process. Even more damning in this

regard: by 2004 Disney followed through on its original plans for the town and sold

its controlling interest in Celebration upon reaching an unspecified number of

95 residential lots sold. Just two years later, Disney management drove the point

home in a much deeper, clearer way: it began the practice of deannexing and selling

off small, individual chunks of Walt Disney World, once hailed as the realization of

96 the EPCOT dream itself, to private businesses and vacation home developers. By

all accounts such a practice would have been unthinkable to Walt given his desire to

keep unplanned construction away from Disney World, but the move seems all the

more egregious when one considers the enormous revenue boom of the Eisner

years, an expansion that made the original Walt Disney Productions look like a mom

and pop studio by comparison.

Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye... The Limits of Control

Walt Disney World was founded with a futuristic experimental city in mind;

the resort’s creation was made possible by the conferring of unprecedented

publicprivate powers and privileges granted to Walt Disney Productions in the

form of the Reedy Creek Improvement District charter. While early resort

construction reflected Walt Disney’s desire to build and develop technological

95 Goodnough, Abby. “Disney Is Selling a Town Built to Reflect the Past.” New York Times, January 16, 2004. 96 Powers, Scott. “Disney Sells Some of Its World.” Orlando Sentinel, March 28, 2006. The sales have included pieces of land in sizes ranging from 30100 acres; not significant given the scope of the property, but clearly counter to the original plan.

concepts meant to improve future city living, a corporate restructuring would see a

change in creative direction that sought to use the powers granted by Reedy Creek

primarily to expand Disney’s hotel holdings and entertainment options. Put more

succinctly: while Eisner and Wells enjoyed the powers granted to Disney by the

state of Florida, the planning, vision, will, and the control needed to build the future

in Florida which had been pursued so fervently by Walt Disney Productions during

its founder’s life proved nowhere near as valuable to a more modern,

corporateminded Disney.

Perhaps it should not come as much of a surprise that the EPCOT city vision

was never fully realized. Analysis shows that many of Walt Disney’s contemporaries

th in the mid20 century quest for urban renewal, so sure and confident in their plans to cure what ailed American cities, inevitably ran into obstacles of varying types and sizes that either compromised or outright denied their visions. Victor Gruen’s new onestopshop downtown community centers of the 1950s did not have the legal nor financial controls to keep the “AntiCity” from their doorsteps, nor the political clout to avoid the consequences of shifting federal tax codes that would limit them to the shape of the modern shopping mall so ubiquitous in modern times. Even

th Robert Moses, that titan of mid20 century New York, could not create an entirely unified vision without facing incredibly vocal resistance from older communities

within New York City, or avoid the financial shortcomings of his World’s Fair

ventures of 1939 and 19641965 when he went about his attempt to mold Queens

and Long Island into his ideal urban space.

Yet Walt Disney seemed to have an answer to all of these issues when he purchased his Disney World. The “AntiCity” was never a fear: the property was simply too big for unwanted tenants to make inroads near the parks, resorts, or recreation areas. Older, entrenched factions were no concern: EPCOT was to be

“built from scratch on virgin land” and filled with Disney employees, an entire community brought together by a large common factor, and politically limited due to the city only allowing residents to rent, not own, their homes or apartments. Even tax codes, mass transportation, trash cleanup and collection, all the concerns of large cities, areas of potential conflict with Florida’s state government, were brushed aside and set for great innovations with the establishment of the Reedy

Creek Improvement District. Floridian government officials, some of whom might have been frightened by the potential of being taken advantage of by such a large media company, were placated by Disney’s honest insistence on not asking for nor taking any tax breaks or loopholes. And while contemporary onlookers may see the project as unfeasible, a fantasy meant for a fantasy theme park, it is difficult to deny that Walt Disney, perhaps through sheer force of will or work, had a knack for making the unfeasible become tangible. It seemed that no threat existed to prevent the shaping of EPCOT, not external political nor business forces, nor from a bottomup resistance of permanent residentcitizens. Disney was well aware of what he could do, and was fully confident in his abilities on this front; asked by friend and novelist Ray Bradbury if he would ever bring his ideas to the public

80 sphere and run for mayor of Los Angeles, Walt is said to have responded “Ray, why should I be mayor when I’m already king?”97

Nonetheless, these seemingly unstoppable factors were waylaid by an entirely different, not to mention uncontrollable force: Walt Disney’s death, an event which eventually triggered a topdown shift in corporate philosophy and a move away from Walt’s urbanist dream.

This serves to reinforce the central theme and very core of what it took to see these grand urban visions through: control. As an architect, Gruen only had so much control in the face of external politicaleconomic forces; Moses, despite his power, could not control the will of large groups of people in a representative democracy.

Despite avoiding these hurdles, Walt Disney could not ensure the full exercise of the control he sought when he faced his inevitable mortality, as control of his company shifted from his brother, to his handpicked successor, to a movie executive who had to trip over a bag of money to realize the potential under his feet near Orlando.

Grand, unified, Modernist, and topdown privately funded ideas cannot be realized without a clear vision and control over an enormous amount of potentially destabilizing factors, factors that might even exist at the top of the company where the vision had first been conceived; such a stark reality is the factor that makes them seem unfeasible in the modern day, as well.

To this day, Disney’s corporate structure and focus is clearly on media, most noticeably on preexisting properties. While Michael Eisner was ousted from his

CEO position in 2004 after a contentious internal battle that left heir apparent Bob

97 Walt and the Promise Page 240. …

Iger in charge, the postEisner years have still led to a period of increased media

presence for Disney, as it set about acquiring known properties and franchises like

98 Star Wars, the Muppets, Pixar Animation, and Marvel Comics. On the theme park front, the clearest focus has continued to rest squarely on film and character properties, with Disney hyping up a recent expansion of the Fantasyland section of the Magic Kingdom, including rides and attractions centered around Snow White, The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast, as the largest in the park’s history. The expansion is part of an even larger recent multibillion dollar investment at the

resort, leaving many to assume that Disney is reacting to, rather than innovating in

the face of, increased competition from movie propertyfocused theme parks, most

notably the incredibly popular Harry Potterthemed section of Universal Studios 99 Orlando. Such a continued focus on preexisting properties and theme pa rk arms

races might have baffled Walt Disney, given how quickly he had already grown

restless for new challenges after the success of Disneyland, but the locus of control

has clearly shifted, and with it the direction of his Florida Project.

Still, some contestation persists: even as recently as April of 2014, Disney

announced the appointment of a new creative head of EPCOT Center, now simply

referred to as Epcot (notably lowercased): Tom Fitzgerald, an Imagineer who

helped construct the park in 1982, who is reportedly tasked with “[restoring] the

98 Patten, Dominic. “DisneyLucasfilm Deal Cleared by Feds.” Deadline Hollywood, December 4, 2012. 99 Garcia, Jason. “Walt Disney World Makeover: Magic Kingdom Getting New Fantasyland with Little Mermaid Ride.” Orlando Sentinel, September 12, 2009.

100 original intent of the park” from a creative standpoint. Yet whatever the outcome of these continued shifts and internal contestations over the nature of Walt Disney

World, of the EPCOT concept, of the Disney company itself, the point remains: control, in frequently unrealistic amounts, is the key magical ingredient needed to see through even the grandest, most thorough, and seemingly foolproof Great, Big,

Beautiful Tomorrows a man can dream.

Perhaps magic is all it may remain in the modern debates over reborn

American cities. After all, Walt Disney’s plan was big; his plan seemed to have every contingency covered; his plan had one of the most powerful media and marketing forces in American history behind it; his plan seemed driven by an earnest, genuine desire to improve city living in a time when voices from all levels of society cried out for practicable solutions; in short, one would have to search long and hard for a more workable grand design plan for urban American in the mid 1960s.

Despite its armor of seeming inevitability, it contained a fatal flaw: it was

Walt Disney’s plan, and Walt Disney could not live forever to exert its needed control. One corporate shakeup after his death put the dream of EPCOT, even from a creative and not just physical standpoint, onto the shelves of the Disney archives.

This is not to say that public development ideas are free from chaos within a democratic system, but such a system at least gives voice to the public such projects should strive to serve. In a modern world where private companies are often sought to play a significant role in the revival of America’s urban spaces, from Disney itself

100 “Imagineer Tom Fitzgerald Takes Over the Creative Direction of Epcot.” Walt Disney Company News. WDWMagic.com, April 25, 2014 (accessed same date).

83 in Times Square to Silicon Valley offshoots in the Bay Area, the public is well served to remember the lessons of EPCOT, that even the most exciting private development plans are subject to a level of corporate instability and upheaval that harm their tenability, and that even the most wellintentioned private sector Imagineer can have his plans go up like so much pixie dust.

Plaque located outside the entrance to EPCOT Center theme park, engraved with the dedication given by Card Walker on October 1, 1982 at the park’s opening ceremony. Photo by author, Neglia, Joseph M. “EPCOT Center Dedication Plaque”. August 2013.

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